Panel 4 preparing for XXth International Congress of Penal Law (Criminal Justice and Corporate Busines, Rome, Italy: November 13-17, 2019) analyses the problems criminal justice systems face in addressing alleged corporate wrongdoing. Corporations, unlike human beings, are established in one state, engage in business in and out of that state, and may have subsidiaries and suppliers in other states. As such, holding them accountable for wrongdoing becomes a complicated transnational issue. Since a multitude of factors come into play within this topic, including the notion that corporate criminal liability is not yet a generally accepted phenomenon. Liability of corporate groups as entities and accountability for a supply chain as an aggregate are also ambiguous issues that have not been addressed in most criminal justice systems. Further, the applicability of prevailing jurisdictional rules to corporations remains unclear, particularly with respect to the principles of active and passive personality.

The country reports have been drafted by representatives of 14 legal systems: Ivory Radha (Australia), Ingeborg Zerbes (Austria), Rodrigo Costa and Renata Barbosa (Brazil), Zhenjie Zhou (China), Dan Helenius (Finland), Juliette Lelieur (France), Martin Böse (Germany), Gabriella Di Paolo (Italy), Cedric Ryngaert (Netherlands), Gleb Bogush (Russia), Ángeles Gutiérrez Zarza (Spain), Per Hedvall (Sweden), Mark Pieth (Switzerland), Sara Sun Beale (USA). The responses address the questionnaire approved by the Board of Directors of the AIDP and distributed to the national groups. Prof. Kenneth Gallant of the University of Arkansas has submitted a special report on “Corporate Criminal Responsibility for Human Rights Violations. Jurisdiction and Reparations”.