2025 Theses Master's

French and US Legal Proceedings Against Lafarge: Experimenting with Corporate Accountability for Gross Human Rights Abuses

Calkins, Molly

International and state enforcement mechanisms have, to date, had limited efficacy in holding business actors accountable for their involvement in gross human rights abuses. Scholars and practitioners offer many reasons for this gap in accountability, from the state-centric nature of international law to jurisdictional and evidentiary constraints of existing legal frameworks, among other explanations. However, developments in scholarship and practice reveal an increasing use of domestic courts to hold corporate actors accountable for their role in extraterritorial violations.

Exemplifying this shift are recent criminal and civil legal actions in France and the United States against multinational building materials conglomerate Lafarge S.A. and its former Syrian subsidiary for their alleged funding of armed groups in Syria during Syria’s civil war. These legal proceedings present instructive case studies for the turn to third-state courts—domestic courts located outside the state(s) where the alleged harm primarily occurred—to address business complicity in extraterritorial abuses.

Undertaking a doctrinal legal and comparative analysis, this paper examines the French and US actions against Lafarge, the opportunities for experimentation that those proceedings present, and their implications for broader efforts to hold business actors responsible for adverse human rights impacts.

In particular, the Lafarge proceedings exhibit promising opportunities to use foreign courts to tackle corporate human rights abuses while revealing valuable experimentation with respect to the: (1) novelty of the legal charges raised; (2) diversity and framing of the selected charges and claims; (3) participation of victims and survivors; (4) depiction of the impact on victims and survivors; and (5) creativity of the potential relief. In doing so, the Lafarge cases illuminate myriad possible paths to hold companies responsible, expose certain limitations of these mechanisms, and offer insights for future efforts to narrow the corporate accountability gap using third-state courts.