On 2 May 2017, Jelle Leunis obtained his PhD in political science from the Free University of Brussels (VUB) on the accountability of private military and security companies (PMSCs), a topic that in this past has proved of interest to UCall too. The full title of the thesis is: ‘The regulatory governance of armed force: Holding private military and security companies to account’. I had the honor to be a member of the examination committee. In this post, I set out, and subscribe to Leunis’s view that the fetishization of legal mechanisms to hold PMSCs to account has overshadowed the question of how to involve citizens in PMSC-based security governance. Enhancing the political-democratic accountability of the use of PMSCs has obvious merit, but further research will be needed regarding how such accountability could be enhanced for affected populations in conflict areas.   

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On 28 April 2017, Sofia Barros successfully defended her PhD at Leuven University on the topic of the responsibility of member states in the context of their participation in international organizations (full title: “Governance as Responsibility – Member State Participation in International Financial Institutions and the Quest for Effective Human Rights Protection”). I had the honor of being the co-supervisor of this thesis. In this post, I draw attention to the novelty of the author’s conceptualization of member states as autonomous actors within international organizations. Her approach is unique in that she demonstrates that conferring separate legal personality on international organizations does not negate the abiding role played by member states in those international organizations, with the attendant consequences for responsibility.     Lees verder →

On 21 April 2017, the Court of Appeal of ‘s-Hertogenbosch convicted Dutch businessman Guus Kouwenhoven to 19 years of imprisonment for, inter alia, complicity in war crimes committed in Liberia. In the late 1990s Kouwenhoven had provided arms to the murderous regime of the Liberian president Charles Taylor, who was later convicted to 50 years of imprisonment by the Special Court of Sierra Leone. This is a rare example of a domestic court holding a corporate actor liable for involvement in the commission of international crimes abroad. In line with the recent Corporate Crimes Principles of the International Corporate Accountability Roundtable, a corporate actor is defined as a ‘corporate entity or individual acting on behalf of a corporate entity’.. It bears emphasis that Kouwenhoven, while directing a corporate entity, was convicted in his individual capacity. In the Netherlands Kouwenhoven is not a unique case; earlier, another businessman, Frans van Anraat, who had sold raw materials for the production of chemical weapons to Saddam Hussein, was also convicted of complicity in war crimes (upheld on appeal). The Kouwenhoven case highlights again the potential of complicity to hold criminally to account Western corporate actors who ‘recklessly’ accept the risk that their business dealings with  warlords could contribute to the commission of international crimes. The next challenge will be how to prosecute corporate entities rather than individual businessmen for their involvement in international crimes.
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