Abstract
The selection of multinational corporate criminal impunity as the subject of the XXth International Congress of AIDP at Luiss University in Rome in 2019 is welcome evidence that international professional societies and academic institutions are bringing much needed focus to this issue. As artificial legal persons, multinational corporations (MNC’s) are imbued with increasingly broad rights but with very few accompanying obligations. Yet multinational corporations do not exist in a legal vacuum. They must be chartered by state authority. As such, ‘all corporations are creatures of the state.’ Consequently, corporations exist under the law—both the law of the state where they are incorporated and the customary and conventional international law incumbent upon that state. In the event of international legal violations, international law often looks to the state to carry out enforcement. However, that is not always the case. Sometimes international law, especially international criminal law, takes the lead on enforcement matters. This was true at Nuremberg and Tokyo with international war crimes tribunals established after World War II and with the Security Council–created ad hoc tribunals in the 1990s for genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity in former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. But sometimes international law provides a backstop on enforcement in the event that the relevant state is unable or unwilling to act, as is the case with the International Criminal Court. Whichever model is used, international law has force and effect that cannot be ignored by either states or actors within those states.