Doing Business with the Devil: The Challenges of Prosecuting Corporate Officials Whose Business Transactions Facilitate War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity
![handle is hein.journals/airfor56 and id is 171 raw text is: DOING BUSINESS WITH THE DEVIL: THE
CHALLENGES OF PROSECUTING
CORPORATE OFFICIALS WHOSE BUSINESS
TRANSACTIONS FACILITATE WAR CRIMES
AND CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY
KYLE REX JACOBSON*
If you want to indict industrialists who helped to rearm Germany,
you will have to indict your own too. The Opel Werke, for
instance, who did nothing but war production, were owned by your
General Motors.-No, that is no way to go about it. You cannot
indict industrialists.
-Hjalmer Horace Greeley Schacht, major war
crimes defendant at the International
Military Tribunal at Nuremberg
I. INTRODUCTION
When the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), Luis
Moreno Ocampo, signaled that persons involved in the trade of blood diamonds
may be subject to charges of complicity in war crimes and genocide,2 at least one
reader of the ABA Journal cried foul: Doesn't the ICC have any sense of the
foundations of criminal law: a legitimate definition of the proscribed act, mens
rea, and conscious and deliberate action? The sort of arbitrary, unlimited liability
nonsense espoused by prosecutor Luis Ocampo is sufficient to reject the ICC and
* Major Kyle R. Jacobson (B.S., Texas A&M University, J.D., Georgetown University Law
Center, LL.M, International and Comparative Law, The George Washington University) is
presently assigned as the Staff Judge Advocate, 470th Air Base Squadron, Geilenkirchen NATO
Air Base, Federal Republic of Germany. This article was submitted in partial completion of the
requirements of the Master of Laws program at the The George Washington University.
G.M. GILBERT, NUREMBERG DIARY 430 (1947). Before his acquittal, Schacht was being
interrogated for information on the German industrialists to be indicted in the next [war crimes]
trial, and made this comment to Dr. Gilbert afterwards. Id. Dr. Gilbert had incredible access to
Schacht and the other major war crimes defendants in his role as the prison psychologist in the
Nuremberg detention facility. Id. at 3.
2 James Podgers, Corporations in Line of Fire, A.B.A. J., Jan. 2004, at 13, 13. The article
reported that Mr. Ocampo suggested that [i]f, for instance, companies that are engaged in trade of
natural resources from the Congo feed money into rebel forces or the government that allows them
to continue the fighting, then it is possible that officials of those companies be prosecuted. Id.
Challenges of Prosecuting Corporate Officials-167](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/airfor56&div=6&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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