The ongoing occupation of Iraq provides us with stark evidence that Western governments are increasingly involving for-profit corporations in combat support, and private military and security companies are playing a key role in military operations.

War crimes are often conceptualized in two ways: as violations of jus ad bellum (the legality of the war in the first place) and as violations of jus ad bello (how the war is conducted). In the context of corporate war crimes, the former category may include the direct role that for-profit organizations play in the planning and execution of illegal wars. Were the 2003 invasion of Iraq to be considered an illegal war (as many international lawyers have claimed), then several U.S. and UK corporations could be implicated in the logistics and planning of the war. The latter category would include the treatment of civilians and enemy combatants in the course of the war. Private companies implicated in the torture of detainees in Abu Ghraib would fall into this category.

The sharp rise in the use of private military companies and mercenary soldiers by governments has also rapidly increased the likelihood of military corporations being involved in both criminal wars and crimes committed in the course of wars. In addition to war crimes, international criminal law has evolved three broad categories of crime that may also implicate corporations in some circumstances: crimes against humanity (systematic crimes against civilians); genocides (crimes aimed at destroying population groups, e.g., ethnic or religious groups); and terrorism (crimes aimed at spreading terror in civilian populations).

At the Nuremberg War Criminal Tribunal, twenty-four IG Farben board members and executives were charged with mass murder, slavery, and other crimes against humanity connected to Hitler’s Nazi regime. One accusation was that, during the planning of the invasion of Poland and Czechoslovakia, IG Farben had cooperated closely with Nazi officials in structuring industry to cope with the industrial demands of the Wehrmacht. There was also evidence that IG Farben built a factory for producing synthetic oil and rubber from coal in Auschwitz. This factory is said to have made use of 83,000 slave laborers at the peak of its production in 1944. IG Farben held the patent on the pesticide Zyklon B, the poison used in the gas chambers of Auschwitz for mass murder. Zyklon B was, moreover, manufactured by Degesch, an IG Farben subsidiary. In 1951, the company was split up into the original constituent companies. The four largest quickly bought the smaller ones, and today only Agfa, BASF, and Bayer remain. By 1951, all of the IG Farben war criminals had been released from prison.

In a separate case, three officers of the company Tesch and Stabenow were tried for supplying the poison gas used for the extermination of Allied nationals interned in the concentration camps. Between 1942 and 1945, four and a half million persons are estimated to have been killed at Auschwitz with Zyklon B. The prosecution’s case was that the commodity was being knowingly supplied to a branch of the state for the mass extermination of civiliannationals. Two senior officers of the company were found guilty; the third was acquitted because he was not in a position in the firm to influence or prevent the transfer of the poison. Both senior officers were hanged for their crimes.

A key issue raised in any discussion of corporate war crimes is that of “victor’s justice”: the idea that only nationals of the vanquished side are punished for their crimes. In this regard, it is significant that none of the U.S. or European firms that supplied the Nazi regime (among the most widely criticized were IBM, Ford, ITT, and Standard Oil) were ever put on trial. As Geoffrey Robertson points out in his book Crimes Against Humanity, the facts surrounding German companies’ supplying of nerve gas, subsequently used to massacre Kurds at Halabja, to Saddam Hussein’s regime raise issues of culpability that are similar to the Tesch and Stabenow case. Moreover, Hussein would not have been able to carry out his genocidal policies against the Kurds without aircraft supplied by Swiss and French corporations and weapons components and systems supplied by U.S. and British corporations.

However, in March 2005, the Netherlands government initiated a case against a Dutch national, Frans van Anraat , who allegedly supplied precursors for mustard and nerve gas used by Iraq. Movements against corporate crime have recently drawn attention to comparable cases that implicate corporations in the supply of equipment for use in war crimes and crimes against humanity, and collaboration with criminal regimes. For example, the supply of bulldozers by the British firm Caterpillar for use by the State of Israel, which used them to flatten Palestinian villages in the occupied territories, was exposed by the killing of Rachel Corrie, a twenty three-year-old American peace activist. Corrie was killed when she tried to prevent a Caterpillar D9 bulldozer from destroying a Palestinian home in the Gaza Strip on March 16, 2003. Campaigners in the UK have held a series of protests to prevent Caterpillar from selling more bulldozers to Israel. Human-rights organizations have alleged that corporations operating in Colombia, such as Coca-Cola and BP, have victimized trade union leaders and local opponents of paramilitary units as part of a generalized campaign to suppress opposition to their operations. Questions have also been raised about the role of corporations in the torture, or “disappearance,”of certain individuals.

Corporate war crimes pose particular problems in terms of enforcement and punishment: neither human-rights law nor the laws of war apply directly to corporations. Indeed, corporations are much more likely to enjoy protections under international law than to be held liable for crimes. This point raises a familiar dilemma in the study of corporate and state crime: that Western criminal law, dominated by the concept of individual intent, is inadequately constructed for dealing with the serious crimes committed by states and corporations. International criminal law has evolved with precisely the same emphasis upon individual, rather than collectively produced, crimes.

It is, therefore, much more likely that criminal liability for corporate war crimes can be attributed to individual directors or owners of corporations. Those cases are, however, likely to be rare for the same reasons that criminal senior officers are able to escape punishment for other crimes that involve injuring, maiming, and killing