The Mens Rea Standard for Corporate Aiding and Abetting Liability - conclusions from international criminal law

Corporate activities are, in general, driven by business interests. Sometimes, corporate actors might knowingly accept that their activities will almost certainly contribute to gross human rights violations that are being carried out, particularly when working in countries with poor human rights records or those in the midst of an armed conflict; however, corporations rarely act with the aim or wish to facilitate them. As a consequence, if corporate responsibility for complicity in gross human rights violations required that the corporation acted with the primary purpose of facilitating violations, they would hardly ever be subject to such liability. 1 A mens rea standard of secondary purpose or knowledge, on the other hand, widens the scenarios in which corporations might face complicity charges. 2 The mens rea test to be applied is thus an important, if not in many cases the determinative, factor for defining the scope of corporate complicity liability.