Since Nuremberg, accountability for mass crimes has relied almost exclusively on a model centred on individual criminal responsibility struggling to capture the complex and collective nature of mass crimes. Early debates within the UN International Law Commission did consider extending criminal responsibility to states, and such an extension was deemed not impossible. The 2001 Draft Articles on Responsibility of States, however, closed this debate, entrenching a “dual” responsibility model in which criminal responsibility is reserved exclusively for individuals.
In parallel, debates have led several domestic jurisdictions to recognize corporate criminal responsibility for mass crimes. For example, the French Penal Code, since 2005, set that legal entities (e.g. corporations, associations) can be criminally liable for offenses committed on their behalf by their organs. This corporate criminal responsibility does not exclude the parallel responsibility of the individuals who are the actual perpetrators, but it explicitly excludes the responsibility of the state. This confirms that criminal accountability is not conceptually confined to natural persons, and there are good reasons why.
The Lafarge criminal proceedings
Between 2012 and 2014, the French company paid around ten million dollars to Daesh and other armed groups in Syria in order to keep its factory operating, knowingly contributing to their criminal machinery, while also endangering the lives of its local employees. The French criminal investigation started in 2016. Thanks to the intervention of NGOs, it came to include allegations of terrorism financing and crimes against humanity - both against individuals and the legal entity.
It has been particularly lengthy process, with the corporation lawyers systematically appealing investigative decisions. Equipped with unlimited resources, systematically appealed procedural issues up to the Supreme Court as part of a strategy of procedural exhaustion. Litigating against a corporation means entering the white-collar legal sphere, where structural asymmetries are stark. As Justine Augier illustrates in her book Personne morale, the burnout of NGO lawyers—often young women working under precarious conditions, and underpaid stands in sharp contrast to the well-funded, heavily resourced corporate legal teams backed by powerful capitalist structures.
And yet, ironically, this strategy of exhaustion produced a landmark jurisprudence against the company: in 2021, the French Court of Cassation ruled that Lafarge (and not only its directors) may be prosecuted for complicity of crimes against humanity as it did not need to share the intent of the crimes perpetrated; it is sufficient that it had knowledge of them. This sets a lower mens rea threshold than in the International Criminal Court’s Rome Statute, which requires that the accomplice provide aid/assistance “for the purpose of facilitating the commission of such a crime.” This lower mens rea threshold is similarly established in counter-terrorism jurisprudence. Interestingly, this Court’s decision was issued one day before the opening of the mediatized Bataclan trial, and in the same courthouse. Notably, the Lafarge case concerned alleged complicity with the same terrorist organization responsible for this attack in France.
This significant jurisprudence opens the door in France to prosecuting corporations that, for example, sell arms to state or non-state actor engaged in the commission of international crimes. As of 2025, at least thirteen criminal proceedings were opened in France against companies and their executives for complicity in international crimes, including genocide, war crimes, torture, and enforced disappearance, with cases relating to Syria, Rwanda, the Central African Republic, Yemen, Sudan, and Egypt. Drawn from the Amnesty International France website—most of these proceedings were initiated following complaints filed by NGOs.
In 2024, the Lafarge case was split: the allegations of complicity in crimes against humanity remain under investigation, while the charges of financing terrorism were brought to trial in November 2025 [see our courtroom diary here].
Transatlantic cooperation
On the other side of the Atlantic, parallel proceedings were initiated in 2017 in the United States, leading to a federal investigation in the Eastern District of New York, apparently because one of the money wires passed through a bank located there. However, the investigation focused exclusively on the charge of providing material support to a terrorist organization, and only against the company.
These investigations benefited from robust transatlantic cooperation, as counterterrorism frameworks for mutual legal assistance were already well established. This facilitated significant exchanges of evidence, including US email interceptions and interrogations carried out by French investigating magistrates. Despite this cooperation, the French proceedings were considered too slow from the perspective of U.S. justice, and in 2022, they were the first to announce a plea agreement with the company, which by then had merged with Holcim. Under the terms of the agreement, the company pleaded guilty to providing material support to a terrorist organization and agreed to acknowledge those facts in any foreign court or judicial proceeding. This was of major importance to the French investigation, which was still ongoing.
This demonstrates that counter-terrorism legal framework, may in practice serve as vehicles for advancing international criminal law. While such frameworks have absorbed in France (and elsewhere) a significant share of the institutional capacity that might otherwise be devoted to the prosecution of international crimes they have nonetheless enabled cases to reach the courtroom and have reinforced international judicial cooperation. Most importantly, as the 2021 precedent illustrates, they have also facilitated doctrinal development in international criminal law.
Where Does the Money Go?
The US plea bargain imposed on the company to pay the U.S. government USD 780 million, the majority of which consisted of the freezing and forfeiture of corporate assets. This is precisely what the French proceedings failed to achieve. By the time the criminal hearing was opening in Paris in November 2025, it became clear that the assets of the company’s former directors had been reduced to little more than a studio or a small two-room flat.
Shortly after the plea bargain, the U.S. Department of Justice had indicated its willingness to transfer to France approximately USD 200 million, potentially for the benefit of the victims. However, this proposal proved bureaucratically complex, and no transfer took place. Today, in light of the change in US administration, such a transfer is no longer under consideration.
Moreover, in January 2025, Holcim and Lafarge brought new legal action against Bruno Lafont and three other former executives, requesting €200 million in compensation before the Paris Court for Economic Activities for the “damage suffered.” As for the human victims, who suffered damage, following the U.S. criminal case, more than 400 Yazidi Americans filed a lawsuit brought a civil action seeking compensation. Yet, those proceedings are limited to U.S. citizens, thereby excluding Syrian victims. In France, the issue of compensation remains unresolved: whether victims will be recognized as civil parties - and, if so, which victims, whether those of the Paris attacks, Yazidi victims in Syria, or Syrian workers from the factory - will depend on the court’s ruling, which is due on Monday 13 April.
Under French criminal procedure, “parties civiles” - which can include both NGOs as legal entities and individual victims with direct harm - enjoy significant procedural rights, including, ultimately, the right to seek compensation within the criminal trial itself. In the Lafarge trial, it was initially unclear whether civil parties would be formally recognized. In a smart procedural decision, the judge allowed civil parties to plead, providing visibility on the “human” consequences of Lafarge’s capitalist decisions. Over 200 civil parties asked to be recognized, and many gave deposition in court, including emotional testimonies from Syrian worker survivors. And yet, the question of whether they may join the proceedings as civil parties will only be decided in the court’s final judgment, which will also determine whether they are entitled to seek compensation.
In this regard, it is worth recalling that in 2021 the French Supreme Court ruled that Life for Paris, a victims’ association related to the 2015 Paris attacks, could not be admitted as a civil party, because there was no sufficiently direct link between their prejudice and the offence of financing terrorism. On the trial, one of the defence lawyers even drew a comparison to white-collar crimes: financing terrorism, like money laundering or tax evasion, does not create direct victims...
While this may be true with respect to the victims of the Paris attacks—and even that is debatable, as the prosecutor specifically emphasized in court what such financing may enable in terms of the purchase of Kalashnikov rifles, or payment of salaries—the position is less clear in relation to the victims of the Syrian factory. They were, in a very direct sense, victims of Daesh members who took them hostage and tortured them, all while Lafarge’s money continued to circulate. Moreover, the company could have chosen to close the factory and, as it did for its foreign employees, spared them from having to continue working in an area controlled by Daesh. Yet capitalism follows its own logic: Lafarge stayed in Syria for compelling economic reasons. Internal emails revealed an expectation of future profits that reconstruction would generate significant business opportunities, precisely because the ongoing civil war was destroying the country. This reasoning resonates with the political economy of contemporary conflicts, including today’s wars in Iran and Gaza. As the trial showed, numbers and graphs were deeply persuasive: they justify the decision to stay, and ultimately to pay USD 10 million to one of the most brutal terrorist organisations.
One step beyond the accountability of individuals
This brutality was impossible to ignore in another trial that took place last month in Paris. Between the Lafarge hearings and the expected decision, the Court heard the case of a French Daesh member, who, for the first time, was prosecuted not only for terrorism, but first for genocide against the Yazidis. NGOs and survivors gave harrowing testimony about the extreme cruelty of the same group that Lafarge had, in effect, helped finance.
This is precisely why criminal accountability must not be limited to individual / directors, who are ultimately interchangeable, but must also extend to the corporate structure itself, which made such decisions possible, rational, and profitable. As the Lafarge trial demonstrates, individual responsibility does not fully capture how capitalist structures facilitate mass crimes and how broader state-level entities can enable such crimes. In this sense, the Lafarge case may signal a shift beyond Nuremberg’s legacy of focusing solely on individuals, pointing toward the recognition of other entities—and, potentially, even State criminal responsibility—in the context of mass crimes.
SHARON WEILL
Sharon Weill is a professor of international law at the American University of Paris and also teaches at Sciences Po Paris. Her research focuses on the relationship between law, conflict and judges. She is the author of The Role of National Courts in Applying International Humanitarian Law (Oxford University Press, 2014), co-editor of Prosecuting the President – The Trial of Hissène Habré (Oxford University Press, 2020) and will soon publish Terror on Trial: an Ethnography of French Court (Cambridge University Press).
