Expert Roundtable:

Lafarge: A New Era of Accountability

Event Description

PILPG and Eversheds Sutherland hosted a conversation with experts regarding the recent case from French courts to indict LaFarge, a cement company, with complicity in crimes against humanity on June 24 from 12 pm to 1 pm EDT.

Transnational corporations may fuel armed conflicts and war economies, and contribute to grave human rights violations, when continuing to operate in areas of conflict. In 2016, a group of former Syrian employees and NGOs filed a criminal complaint in French courts against Lafarge, a cement company, and its subsidiary Lafarge Cement Syria, for alleged abuses committed in Syria. The alleged abuses included buying raw material from the Islamic State and other armed groups to maintain its business activities during the Syrian Civil War and compensating these groups for safe passage of workers and products. A judicial inquiry has since determined that the financial value of these arrangements amounted to at least 13 million euros.

Lafarge was charged with complicity in war crimes, crimes against humanity, financing of a terrorist enterprise, and forced labor. In 2019, Lafarge had successfully appealed this charge, but in September 2021, the French Supreme Court decided that Lafarge could be charged with complicity in crimes against humanity. As a result of the Supreme Court’s decision, the appeals court is now revisiting the case. The ruling by the Paris Appeals Court against Lafarge is the first time that a company, as a legal entity, has been indicted in France for complicity in human rights violations and could be a turning point in combating corporate impunity.

During this event our panelists provided expert background to the case, gave insight to how non-governmental entities and non-state actors could be found complicit in atrocity crimes, and what this potential new era of accountability may mean for corporations. This event was moderated by PILPG Managing Director Professor Milena Sterio.

This event is part of the PILPG Thought Leadership Initiative. The Initiative focuses on prominent international law and international affairs topics and organizes monthly expert roundtables to share expertise and reflections from our work on peace negotiations, post-conflict constitution drafting, and war crimes prosecution.

Event Recording

Speakers

**Meriam Al-Rashid**
Meriam Al-Rashid represents and advises clients on complex international disputes with a focus on public international law including issues related to human rights, international investment arbitration, international commercial arbitration, and foreign investor risk management. Meriam has served as counsel in disputes and transactions involving parties from across the globe, including the Americas, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and Europe. Meriam also acts as arbitrator on commercial and investor-state disputes primarily involving parties from the Middle East and North Africa.

Meriam also works on matters surrounding post-conflict peace negotiations and governance, and investigation and adjudication of war crimes, including but not limited to: analyzing and documenting atrocity crimes against the Rohingya in Myanmar for the determination of genocide, crimes against humanity and atrocity crimes as well as international adjudication of atrocity crimes in mass deportation or displacement. Meriam has also been appointed as a committee member of the Cyrus R. Vance Center for International Justice.

**Christopher Goebel**
Christopher Goebel is a Senior Peace Fellow with PILPG. As one of PILPG’s original members, he has consulted during peace processes and other transitions on transitional justice, constitutions, security, and humanitarian issues, focusing recently on Syria and Sudan, with additional experience concerning Kenya, Libya, Yemen, Chad, Senegal, the Balkans and elsewhere. His most recent experience includes advisor to judges and lawyers from a wide range of areas in Libya on their strategies for engaging Libyan civil society on potential transitional justice and accountability efforts at a grassroots level.
As a long-time member of PILPG’s negotiation support team for the Geneva peace process, he has regularly contributed expertise to the Syrian opposition leaders on accountability issues, including options for prosecuting atrocity crimes. Most recently, he advised a committee of Syrian opposition and civil society leaders formulating strategies for transitional justice and accountability during a constitutional drafting process.
Mr. Goebel has extensive prior experience in law firms in Paris and New York. He earned his B.A. from Cornell University and his J.D. from Harvard Law School. As a Fulbright scholar, he researched on international humanitarian law and accountability during Balkans conflicts and has published on similar subjects in leading journals.

Professor Michael Kelly

Professor Kelly coordinates the International and Comparative Law Program at Creighton University School of Law, including its nationally-ranked summer school program on international criminal law and the Holocaust in Germany: From Nuremberg to The Hague. He is past-president of the U.S. National Chapter and currently a member of the Board of Directors of L’Association International du Droit Pénal, a Paris-based society of international criminal law scholars, judges and attorneys founded in 1924 that enjoys consultative status with the United Nations. His research and teaching focuses on the fields of international and comparative law and Native American law. He is the author and co-author of seven books and over forty articles; his widely-cited work is among the top 3% downloaded from the Social Science Research Network (SSRN).

Professor Kelly’s field work on genocide took him to northern Iraq where he also consulted with the Kurdish Regional Government on federalism and constitutional issues. He serves as Co-Chair with David Satola (World Bank) of the American Bar Association’s Task Force on Internet Governance, with whom he published a leading article on the European Union’s "Right to Be Forgotten" as a cyber-privacy right in the Univeristy of Illinois Law Review and with whom he is currently working to develop a matrix tracking the migration of human rights from the physical world into the digital world as Internet Human Rights. Professor Kelly is a Corresponding Editor for the American Society of International Law’s flagship publication International Legal Materials, and served from 2012-2015 as a member of the President’s Advisory Committee on Global Engagement for the American Association of Law Schools (AALS).

Professor Kelly recently authored the book “Prosecuting Corporations for Genocide”, a book which lays much of the theoretical groundwork for increased corporate accountability.

MODERATOR

Milena Sterio, the Charles R. Emrick Jr. - Calfee Halter & Griswold Professor of Law at Cleveland State University’s Cleveland-Marshall College of Law and Managing Director at PILPG is a leading expert on international law, international criminal law and human rights. Sterio is one of six permanent editors of the prestigious IntLawGrrls blog, and a frequent contributor to the blog focused on international law, policy and practice. In the spring of 2013, Sterio was selected as a Fulbright Scholar, spending the semester in Baku, Azerbaijan, at Baku State University. While in Baku, she had the opportunity to teach and conduct research on secession issues under international law related to the province of Azerbaijan, Nagorno-Karabakh. Serving as a maritime piracy law expert, she has participated in meetings of the United Nations Contact Group on Piracy off the Coast of Somalia as well as in the work of the United Nations Global Counterterrorism Forum. Sterio has also assisted piracy prosecutions in Mauritius, Kenya and the Seychelles Islands. Sterio is a graduate of Cornell Law School and the University of Paris I, and was an associate in the New York City firm of Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton before joining the ranks of academia full time. She has published seven books and numerous law review articles. Her latest book, “The Syrian Conflict’s Impact on International Law,” (co-authored with Paul Williams and Michael Scharf) was published by Cambridge University Press in 2020.