Corporate manslaughter
Corporate manslaughter is a legal concept that holds corporations criminally liable for deaths resulting from their negligence or disregard for health and safety regulations. This form of liability has been established in various jurisdictions, prominently in the United Kingdom and Australia. To successfully prosecute a corporation for corporate manslaughter, evidence must typically show that the organization failed to uphold its duty of care, leading to fatal outcomes. The UK's Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act of 2007 is a significant statute in this area, allowing courts to impose substantial fines on companies found guilty, with penalties reflecting the organization’s size and earnings.
In Australia, similar laws have emerged, with states like Victoria and Queensland enacting their own corporate manslaughter statutes. These laws represent a response to public demand for greater accountability from corporations, especially following high-profile incidents of corporate negligence. Other countries, such as Canada and Hong Kong, have also developed frameworks for addressing corporate liability, although the application of such laws may vary. Overall, corporate manslaughter laws aim to ensure that organizations are held responsible for their actions, paralleling the legal responsibilities of individuals in cases of negligence that result in loss of life.
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Corporate manslaughter
Corporate manslaughter is a legal concept that attaches criminal liability to corporate entities whose negligence or indifference to health, safety, and fiduciary standards results in loss of life. As of 2022, such statutes have been enacted as law in multiple jurisdictions around the world, most notably the United Kingdom and Australia. Standards for invoking such laws to bring criminal charges against a corporation vary by jurisdiction, but they generally require evidence that the corporate entity overlooked or ignored its fiduciary duty of care in initiating events leading to the loss of human life.
Many jurisdictions that do not specifically have corporate manslaughter laws can still initiate criminal prosecutions against businesses and their individual employees, including senior executives. Such actions are enabled by a broader and more generalized but related legal framework known as criminal corporate liability.
Background
A 2013 scholarly review of the legal concept of corporate manslaughter noted that the international community has generally migrated toward the criminalization of corporate negligence since about the early 1990s. This timeframe coincides with major shifts in the global geopolitical landscape, including the fall of European Communism and the acceleration of economic globalism. These events and developments facilitated the rise of multinational mega-corporations—entities that became highly influential economic and political institutions with international reach.
In response to the growing power of multinational corporations, the public began to demand greater levels of legal accountability for their actions. These demands have tended to follow high-profile instances of corporate misconduct or ethically questionable activities. One key example includes the fallout of the 2008 global financial crisis, which saw investment banks receive government bailouts despite their complicity in causing the international economic meltdown. Another relates to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, in which eleven oil workers died following an explosion on an offshore rig operated by the multinational energy company British Petroleum (BP). Such events reveal a growing public appetite for laws to punish corporate wrongdoing similar to those applied in cases involving individual citizens.
Some of the first laws explicitly targeting corporate manslaughter were instituted prior to the 2008 global financial crisis by governments acting to address public concerns over corporate negligence. In 2007, lawmakers in the United Kingdom passed the landmark Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act. The legislation followed a 1996 legal commission report calling for standalone legal statutes that would facilitate the prosecution of companies for criminal offenses normally reserved for individual defendants. This report formed the basis of another 2000 study, in which the UK government endorsed the idea of legal reforms in support of increased penalties for corporations whose negligence or noncompliance with health, safety, and duty of care standards result in the loss of human life. The UK government first drafted a corporate manslaughter bill in 2005 before passing an amended version in 2007.
Similarly, the Australian government amended its 1995 Criminal Code Act by adding a section explicitly stating that the country’s criminal laws apply to corporate bodies just as they apply to individuals. The Australian statute states, “A body corporate may be found guilty of any offense, including one punishable by imprisonment.” This section established the basis for the corporate manslaughter standards currently used in the Australian legal system.
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The UK and Australian legal standards represent two of the best-known and highest-profile examples of laws that explicitly attach criminal liability to corporations whose actions lead directly to the loss of human life. Legal experts note that the UK’s laws are precedent-setting in that they use a direct mechanism for establishing corporate liability in manslaughter and homicide cases. A brief on the UK corporate manslaughter law released by the country’s Ministry of Justice states that an organization can be found criminally liable “if the way in which its activities are managed and organi[z]ed causes a death and amounts to a gross breach of a relevant duty of care to the deceased.” It further states that a “substantial part of the breach must be in the way activities were managed by [the organization’s] senior management.” The Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act levies fines against organizations found guilty by UK courts, with the penalties being proportional in value to the organization’s size as measured by its revenues. Maximum fines are set at £20 million, plus up to an additional £10 million for accompanying breaches of UK health and safety standards. In February 2010, a small company known as Cotswold Geotechnical Holdings became the first corporation to be convicted of corporate manslaughter under the UK’s 2007 law. The court finding came in response to the passing of a young geologist who died when a pit collapsed at a construction site where the company was conducting operations. In 2022, a gardening supplies company called Deco-Pak was convicted of corporate manslaughter related to a 2017 incident where an employee lost their life while attempting to clean a sensor on a robotic packing machine.
In Australia, the sectional amendments to the 1995 Criminal Code Act laid the foundations for laws specifically targeting corporate manslaughter, which have since been adopted by multiple Australian jurisdictions. In 2019, the Australian state of Victoria and the country’s Northern Territory enacted explicit laws against corporate manslaughter, joining the Australian state of Queensland and the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) in adding such statutes to their legal codes. The expansion of Australian corporate manslaughter laws sparked speculation that neighboring New Zealand would follow. Parliamentarian Camilla Belich of New Zealand proposed such a law in 2024. The Crimes (Corporate Homicide) Amendment Bill would create a criminal offense for employers who cause the death of a person and hold negligent companies accountable when their employees are killed at work.
The Australian legal model established by the country’s federal Criminal Code Act conforms to a structural approach that uses a concept known as a “mechanism of attribution” to allow corporations to be charged with offenses normally levied against individuals. While the Australian jurisdictions that later adopted specific laws against corporate manslaughter did so using direct mechanisms, experts note its roots in the mechanism of attribution structure.
Hong Kong also has laws facilitating the criminal punishment of corporate manslaughter, which use an indirect mechanism of attribution structure to establish liability. However, observers note that Hong Kong’s corporate manslaughter laws are very rarely applied. Numerous other countries, including the United States, China, India, Japan, Indonesia, and multiple states in the European Union (EU) feature corporate criminal liability laws capable of holding companies criminally responsible for loss of life and other offenses, but these statutes are general in nature and do not specifically single out the act of manslaughter.
Bibliography
Almond, P. “The International ‘Corporate Manslaughter’ Phenomenon.” Corporate Manslaughter and Regulatory Reform: Crime Prevention and Security Management, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, pp. 34–59.
“Corporate Criminal Liability.” Clifford Chance, Apr. 2016, www.cliffordchance.com/content/dam/cliffordchance/briefings/2016/04/corporate-criminal-liability-heat-map.pdf. Accessed 14 Dec. 2024.
“Corporate Manslaughter.” Crown Prosecution Service, 16 July 2018, www.cps.gov.uk/legal-guidance/corporate-manslaughter. Accessed 14 Dec. 2024.
“Corporate Manslaughter.” Health and Safety Executive, Government of the United Kingdom, www.hse.gov.uk/corpmanslaughter. Accessed 14 Dec. 2024.
Harper, Anthony. “Leading Lawyer’s Doubts about Proposed Corporate Manslaughter Law.” Stuff, 28 Apr. 2019, www.stuff.co.nz/business/industries/112273036/leading-lawyers-doubts-about-proposed-corporate-manslaughter-law. Accessed 14 Dec. 2024.
Kaur, Amrit. “An Overview of the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007.” iPleaders,13 Aug. 2021, blog.ipleaders.in/overview-corporate-manslaughter-corporate-homicide-act-2007. Accessed 14 Dec. 2024.
“NZCTU Welcomes Corporate Manslaughter Bill Introduction.” New Zealand Council of Trade Unions Te Kauae Kaimahi, 28 Apr. 2024, union.org.nz/nzctu-welcomes-corporate-manslaughter-bill-introduction. Accessed 14 Dec. 2024.
Wood, Sophie. “Review of Recent Corporate Manslaughter Cases: Deco-Pak, Bosley Mill, Aster Healthcare.” Kingsley Napley, 2 Feb. 2022, www.kingsleynapley.co.uk/insights/blogs/criminal-law-blog/review-of-recent-corporate-manslaughter-cases-deco-pak-bosley-mill-aster-healthcare. Accessed 14 Dec. 2024.