Businesses have a long-standing record of involvement in severe human rights violations, a trend that continues today and is likely to persist, and that is often aggravated during periods of conflict. However, corporate actors have mostly been excluded from transitional justice mechanisms, and corporate accountability remains an elusive element of transitional justice. In this context of impunity, scholars have called for the inclusion of economic actors in transitional justice processes and for stronger links between the transitional justice and business and human rights (BHR) fields. Focusing on Colombia, this chapter explores the mobilisation of victims’ organisations during and after the Peace Agreements, highlighting their pivotal role in shaping transitional justice and BHR debates and contesting corporate impunity. It underscores the need for context-sensitive, legally binding accountability mechanisms, and argues that addressing corporate complicity in conflict is not only essential for achieving justice but also a demand rooted in victims’ lived experiences, offering valuable insights for the intersection of transitional justice and BHR.

While the international legal issues related to the search for disappeared persons have received considerable attention, limited research has been conducted on how participation in the search impacts victims’ lives. In particular, we argue that the importance of victim recognition needs to be inserted into these discussions, and our understanding improved about what types of institutional and social responses are needed to ensure effective and victim-oriented search processes. Our chapter utilises the concept of ‘recognition relationships’ with reference to two cases: Colombia and El Salvador. Our discussion illuminates the ways in which a focus on recognition relationships captures the dynamics of power, mobilisation, and participation which are central to any successful and just search process.

It has been widely recognised in the legal as well as law and economics literature that both regulatory and private enforcement are needed to ensure the effectiveness of market regulation in general and EU private law in particular. This chapter unpacks the interplay between these two enforcement mechanisms, focusing on three major issues that arise in practice: the disclosure of evidence gathered by regulatory agencies, the limitation periods for private enforcement actions, and the combined application of administrative sanctions and private law remedies. The chapter constructs three models of the relationship between public and private enforcement – separation, substitution, and complementarity – and explains their main characteristics, manifestations, and implications. It also assesses the potential of each model to strike the right balance between deterrence in the name of the public interest and compensation in the name of interpersonal justice, as well as between uniformity and diversity in regulatory and private enforcement, and draws out some of the practical implications of this analysis for EU private lawmaking and enforcement.

In situations of aparadigmatic transitions, where formal transitional justice mechanisms do not exist, or may only partially exist, ‘victims’ are typically the most active drivers behind a range of intersecting justice struggles. Based on the author’s fieldwork in Kabul with war victims since 2008, this chapter underlines the importance of a bottom-up and victim-centred approach towards memorialisation and accountability efforts. This approach emphasises participation, agency and empowerment. In particular, it elaborates on the meaningfulness of methodologies used in the Theatre of the Oppressed to engage, raise awareness, and create participatory forums for war victims in Afghanistan from 2009 to August 2021. These methodologies offer various perspectives on understanding the protagonism of victims, and require us to embrace and recognise different approaches to engaging in the justice process.

This chapter examines the defensive measures provisions of the EU Takeover Directive of 2004 in the light of the changing policy orientation of both the EU Commission and the Member States towards the role of takeovers in relation to industrial policy. As far as the Commission is concerned, it charts a decline from initial enthusiasm for the threat of the hostile takeover as a central tool for promoting the Union’s industrial policy, via acceptance that the Directive would not achieve this goal because of Member State opposition, to at least partial acceptance of the arguments against making the control of companies contestable. The second half of the chapter analyses whether the failure of the Commission’s initial plans for defensive measures can truly be regarded as a missed opportunity, because those proposals would have been of limited importance, even if enacted. The chapter concludes that the ‘shareholder structure’ and ‘pre-bid defences’ versions of the argument that the Commission’s proposals were trivial carry more weight than the argument that other provisions of national company law already achieved the Commission’s goal.

This chapter presents the statistical analysis of the main theoretical propositions across countries. It first discusses the sample of seventy-six Third Wave democracies (1974–2005), why the homicide rate is used as the metric of criminal violence, and the different indices created to capture various dimensions of truth commissions, trials, and amnesty laws. It then explains why we test for the immediate and cumulative impacts of truth commissions, trials, and amnesty laws and their joint effects. Using the global sample and a subsample of seventeen Latin American countries, the results indicate that truth commissions have a strong deterrent effect on the murder rate and criminal prosecution only has an impact when combined with truth commissions. The joint effect of truth and justice represents the accountability shock’s violence-reducing effect. The shock is more powerful in the Latin American subsample. Additional models reveal two crucial points: (1) to have an effect, the accountability shock needs to be robust; and (2) the effect of the accountability shock (absent other measures) expires after about ten years. The positive association between amnesty laws and higher homicide rates reinforces the conclusion that persistent state impunity promotes violence, underscoring the importance of accountability for past atrocities as necessary for future violence reduction.