Closing the Corporate Accountability Gap: Lessons for Syria’s Transitional Justice Framework

Syria’s transition into a new political reality has brought questions of transitional justice from the theoretical to the urgently practical. Who will be held accountable for the abuses of the past decade? What mechanisms will be capable of delivering meaningful redress? And critically, will accountability extend beyond armed individuals to the economic actors who enabled, financed, and profited from the mass atrocities of the last 15 years?

These questions are not novel. Post-conflict societies from Nuremberg to Bogotá have grappled with the role of businesses in sustaining violence, and the record is sobering. Earlier this year, the Paris Criminal Court found cement giant Lafarge guilty of financing terrorism and violating international sanctions for its operations in Syria. a landmark ruling that signals growing recognition of corporate entity complicity. Yet Lafarge remains the exception. A comparative review of five transitional justice settings — Germany, South Africa, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Colombia, and Sierra Leone — reveals a consistent pattern: whilst transitional justice frameworks have increasingly acknowledged the role of corporate actors in conflict, they have overwhelmingly failed to translate that acknowledgement into enforceable accountability. For Syria, learning from these failures is a design imperative.

A Gap That Keeps Reappearing

The “corporate accountability gap” reflects the deep roots of state-centric and individually-focused criminal law paradigms. The Nuremberg Military Tribunals are often cited as a foundational precedent, yet the historical record is more nuanced than this framing suggests. While corporations as legal entities were never formally prosecuted, leading industrialists were tried for financing the SS, profiting from slave labour, and sustaining the Nazi war economy. The dissolution of IG Farben demonstrated that corporate entities could be subject to punitive intervention even without formal criminal conviction. The real lesson of Nuremberg is not that corporate accountability is legally impossible, but that it must be actively constructed through tailored legal instruments — without which political and economic pressures will erode whatever gains are made. Many industrialist convictions were later reduced or commuted as Western powers prioritised reconstruction and geopolitical stability. For Syria, the parallel is direct: resisting pressure to normalise economic relations at the expense of accountability requires explicit legal safeguards built in from the outset.

Voluntary Participation

South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and its 1997 Business and Labour Hearings formally acknowledged the role of corporations in sustaining apartheid. However, since corporate participation was voluntary and the TRC lacked enforcement powers, those findings produced no binding accountability or reparations. The subsequent Khulumani litigation illustrated both the possibilities and the severe limitations of relying on foreign jurisdictions to fill domestic gaps. When both the South African and US governments moved to obstruct the case, what resulted was a paralysis of accountability that left victims without remedy.

Colombia’s more recent experience reinforces the same lesson. Despite a sophisticated three-pillar transitional justice system, corporate actors remain subject only to voluntary participation. The Truth Commission’s final report documented how economic actors facilitated violence through land dispossession and contracts securing military protection for corporate infrastructure. However, without mandatory jurisdiction, documentation has not translated into accountability. The 2024 jury verdict against Chiquita Brands, the first time a US jury found a corporation liable for overseas human rights abuses, took seventeen years of litigation, showcasing why foreign proceedings cannot substitute for robust domestic mechanisms.

Overlooking the Local

Bosnia and Herzegovina offers a further cautionary tale, particularly relevant to Syria’s fragmented economic landscape. The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) pursued individual criminal accountability with considerable rigour yet left the political economy of the conflict entirely unaddressed. The Dayton Agreement prioritised market reconstruction over accountability, enabling wartime elites to consolidate economic power in the post-war period. Most instructively, the framework’s omissions extended beyond large corporations to locally embedded economic actors, enterprises that materially enabled wartime violence but were never scrutinised. For Syria, where local businesses and networks played a significant role in sustaining regime abuses, a framework that focuses solely on high-level actors risks leaving intact the economic structures that enabled and benefited from the conflict.

What Syria Needs

The comparative record points toward several concrete design requirements for a Syrian transitional justice framework. The most fundamental is mandatory jurisdiction over economic actors. Across every case examined, voluntary participation produced the same result: documentation without accountability. Any Syrian mechanism must include compulsory jurisdiction over both corporate entities and individuals acting in a business capacity, insulated from political interference.

The framework must also address the full spectrum of economic complicity. Sierra Leone’s experience with diamond financing illustrates how conflict economies operate through layered, diffuse networks, while Bosnia demonstrates the consequences of overlooking local actors entirely. Civil society must be institutionally empowered rather than merely included: Colombia’s organisations such as Dejusticia and the Corporate Accountability Lab demonstrate what sustained advocacy can achieve. Syrian civil society, including diaspora organisations with considerable legal capacity, should be formally integrated into transitional justice mechanisms with the standing to make that participation substantive.

Syria’s transitional justice process is still being shaped. The choices made now about institutional design and the treatment of economic actors will determine whether accountability is genuinely achieved or, once again, deferred in favour of reconstruction and political expediency. Closing the corporate accountability gap is not a secondary concern. It is central to whether transitional justice in Syria will be meaningful at all.

Written by: Alia Khalouf, Legal Intern at HRBU, LSE LLB Graduate