Principle 2
Understanding "complicity": Definitions and examples
A company may be complicit in human rights abuses if it authorizes, tolerates, or knowingly ignores human rights abuses committed by an entity associated with it, or if the company knowingly provides practical assistance or encouragement that has a substantial effect on the perpetration of human rights abuse. The participation of the company need not actually cause the abuse. Rather the company’s assistance or encouragement has to be to a degree that, without such participation, the abuses most probably would not have occurred to the same extent or in the same way.
Avoiding complicity in human rights abuses is an important challenge for business. As the dynamics between governments, companies, and civil society organisations change, so too does the understanding of when and how different organisations should take on responsibilities for human rights issues. Four situations help to illustrate how the notion of complicity might arise:
- When the company actively assists, directly or indirectly, in human rights violations committed by others e.g. where a company provides information, funds or equipment to a government that it knows will be used to violate human rights;
- When the company is in a partnership with a government and knew or should have known that the government is likely to commit abuses in carrying out its end of the agreement e.g. forced relocation of peoples;
- When the company benefits from human rights violations even if it does not positively assist or cause them e.g. abuses committed by security forces, such as the suppression of a peaceful protect against business activities or the use of repressive measures while guarding company facilities; and
- When the company is silent or inactive in the face of systematic or continuous human rights violations e.g. inaction or acceptance by companies of systematic discrimination in employment law against particular groups.
Where an international crime is involved, complicity may arise where a company assisted in the perpetration of the crime, the assistance had a substantial effect on the perpetration of the crime and the company knew that its acts would assist the perpetration of the crime even if it did not intend for the crime to be committed.
State-owned enterprises should be aware that because they are part of the state, they may have direct responsibilities under international human rights law.
Examples of when companies have faced accusations of complicity in human rights abuses:
- An oil company is being sued in the USA for alleged complicity in serious abuses committed by foreign government forces in the building of a natural gas pipeline. The list of alleged abuses include rape and forced labour.
- A complaint has been filed in a US court against a company for allegedly hiring or otherwise directing paramilitary security forces that used extreme violence and murdered, tortured, unlawfully detained or otherwise silenced trade union leaders of the union representing workers at the company's facilities in a third country.
- South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission concluded that companies had been "willing collabourators" with the apartheid regime since the early 1960s. It said certain corporations had had a "direct interest in maintaining the status quo." Such corporations bypassed attempts to impose sanctions by "forming partnerships with South African parastatal organisations".
- A report by the UN Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) found in 2003 that the exploitation of natural resources by international corporations had fueled a bloody civil war characterized by widespread human rights violations. Corporations that had obtained, traded or purchased lucrative natural resources in the DRC were said to have financed the groups who carried out these violations.