The International ‘Corporate Manslaughter’ Phenomenon

Abstract

The early 21st century is part of the era of mega-corporate capitalism (Braithwaite 2008: 19), and the increasing dominance of multinational corporations as institutions of economic, political, and social influence has been accompanied by demands for them to be held more accountable for their actions (Wells 2001). The post-2008 global financial crisis, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, and a host of other events have demonstrated both the centrality of corporations to the new world order and also their power to destroy the lives and livelihoods of individuals. The criminalisation of corporate offending has become a key theme within the debates that follow these events, and there has been a new acceptance of the notion that a company can be criminally culpable. It is no longer the case that deaths at work are universally construed as accidents, which, if they are characterised as forms of wrongdoing at all, are viewed as matters of mala prohibita rather than mala in se. In this chapter, the trend towards imposing corporate criminal liability for work-related deaths will be explored in an international context, to build on the discussion of the British context in Chapter 1.