Failure to Act in Times of Pandemic: Is There a Role for the International Criminal Law Doctrine of Superior Responsibility?

This article explores the responsibility of military or civilian superiors in international criminal law for their failure to act in relation to a potentially lethal virus epidemic or pandemic. In this direction, two different angles of the issue are discussed. The first focuses on the responsibility of individuals in positions of power for their failure to prevent the spread of the virus or provide adequate health support to an epidemic or pandemic affected population, when this population is used as a target group for the commission of crimes against humanity, war crimes or even genocide. The second refers to the responsibility of these superiors for their failure to prevent their subordinates to use such an epidemic or pandemic as a mean to commit crimes against humanity or war crimes. It is argued that, in order for superior responsibility to be attributed in these circumstances, a careful consideration on the theory of omission and the nature of superior responsibility is required

Individual Criminal Responsibility of Company Directors under the Statute of the International Criminal Court

This research discusses the criminal responsibility of company directors for international crimes committed in the course of the corporation’s activities, focusing on the modes of responsibility of the Statute of the International Criminal Court. Despite the collective aspect of international crimes, international criminal law struggles to attribute criminal responsibility to the members of non-state collective entities. The underlying obstacle is that the modes of responsibility in international criminal law have been constructed and interpreted so far having in mind collective entities with state-like characteristics. Nevertheless, not all collective entities possess such characteristics and the corporation is a good example. This research argues that disentangling the interpretation of international criminal law from the state factor conforms with the aim of international criminal law, which is the protection of human dignity from any non-state actor with the capacity to violate it. It, consequently, adopts a capacity-oriented approach regarding the application of the international criminal law rules to non-state collective entities, in general, and the corporation, in particular. Under this approach, it initially identifies the relationship between the corporation, as a collective entity, and the individuals in control of it; it then re-interprets the international criminal law rules on the attribution of individual criminal responsibility and applies them against the company directors, focusing on the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. More specifically, it discusses the ‘control though an organisation’ doctrine; the ‘aiding and abetting with the purpose of facilitating the commission of the crime’ element of secondary responsibility; the nature of superior responsibility and the notion of ‘control over the acts of the subordinates’. At the same time, it applies the proposed interpretation upon these doctrines on different scenarios of corporate criminality, explaining how it can be proved useful in attributing criminal responsibility to the company directors at the international level