Where corporations legally justify child slavery because of Zyklon B.
it’s not that simple. it’s because the actions occurred somewhere else, as in “not in this country”, not in the courts’ jurisdiction. that is the crux of the matter. the united states is not the world police. if people go get gay married in other countries then come back to the usa, that does not mean they should be prosecuted. this was actually tried. if we ignore jurisdiction, then people who cross state lines to get abortions could be prosecuted for doing so in their home state. people who go to amsterdam or elsewhere and do legal drugs in those places can then be criminally prosecuted here.
what could still happen is that nestle is held accountable for using child slavery in its supply lines, if there are laws banning such. this particular lawsuit is about international law. this is not the first such lawsuit, and previous suits have reduced the tort this was brought under to basically nothing. the argument being used by the corporations is ridiculous.
this is a clickbait headline and not honest. there isn’t even a link to the actual article where this is explained. i don’t know if the tweet was falsely edited up in the screenshot or if the article was edited, because the article that links to says absolutely nothing about nuremberg, nazis, or zyklon b.
Firstly, It’s not selectively edited.
You didn’t search for Zyklon B in that link, though. It’s right here.
Secondly, The argument was explicitly “the international community didn’t hold the companies responsible for Zyklon B, so you can’t hold us responsible for child slavery.”
As for the argument in the article/ tweet, I have no idea how the author can literally link the brief and then get the restatement of the brief’s argument misleadingly wrong. The statement that the brief discussed how the international community has not traditionally held that liability extended to corporations (rather than to individuals) is entirely correct; however, the context of Zyklon B manufacturing makes substantially more sense in context. The brief discusses how the Nuremberg trials extended the traditional liability for sovereigns to individuals, but not to corporations. Therefore, while the owner and two employees of the firm that manufactured Zyklon B were indicted, the actual firm itself was not. It’s not that someone cannot be held accountable for child slavery, it’s that the companies themselves are not held responsible for these sorts of actions under international law. Additionally, Zyklon B is explicity used as an extreme example which is to say “even in this case the company was not held liable–the individuals were.”
The brief goes on to mention the ICTR and ICTY tribunals (dealing with genocide and crimes against humanity in Rwanda and Yugoslavia respectively) as followers of the Nuremberg tradition of not extending individual liability to corporations. The brief further makes the claim that there is no real rulebook on how to create this liability for corporations, and that if such liability is to be created it must be done by Congress as opposed to the judiciary. This is disputed by other amicus briefs, as well as by other cases, but that’s kind of outside the purpose of this post which is more to clarify the argument in the brief itself.
For what it’s worth, this is a fairly extremeargument, and one that I personally do not agree with. However, it rests on a little sounder footing than merely “we didn’t charge the firm that made Zyklon B, therefore we can’t charge Nestle and Cargill for child slavery.” Likewise, this argument was rejected by the Court who instead applied the first section of the brief based on Kiobel rather than the more extreme argument predicted on an application of Jesner and the above-discussed international norms.
I have no idea how this got a little twisted in the Slate article, but I do think that the article’s reporting is at least somewhat misleading for those who either don’t know the type of law in question or don’t read the brief. And that’s unfortunate. I think that the author’s biases, which are front and center throughout this piece, impede on the reporting a little. I can’t fault anyone who read the Slate article from coming away with a bit of a skewed perspective on the brief. Instead, I fault that article’s author who really should know better.
