Disclaimer: Asymmetrical Haircuts is produced as a podcast, meaning it is meant to be listened to and not read. Because of this, we recommend that you listen to the episode while reading, because the written word does not do justice to the emotion or tone used by our speakers. However, because we recognise there might be bandwidth issues or you might be using a hearing aid, we have provided written transcripts for all our available episodes.

[INTRO MUSIC]

Stephanie: 00:59  Hi Janet, 

Janet: 01:02  Hi, Steph. We seem to be in a sort of inadvertent mini series at the moment, connected to Argentina. Last month, we touched on, I think it was the second time that we’d done this, a possibility for accountability for killings and for torture in Venezuela via Argentine court.

Stephanie: 01:19  Yeah. Plus, we’ve just put out our podcast with Gissou Nia about the first possible investigation into the crackdown in Iran via the Argentinian legal system. 

Janet: 01:26 And of course, we haven’t forgotten Myanmar, because while the hearings were happening at the International Court of Justice last month, we’ve been reminding ourselves of the case that we’ve already covered where arrest warrants have been issued by Argentine courts for Myanmar top leaders.

Stephanie: 01:45  But meanwhile, you took it upon yourself to organize this podcast on corporate crimes in Argentina.

Janet: 01:51  Yeah, this is an area that we’ve looked at, albeit quite briefly. We’ve followed two very different but interesting cases which become entwined in my brain, because they both begin with L, Lundin and Lafarge, which are about responsibility for corporate crime. So it was when Roy Bachmutsky, hi Roy, welcome to the show.

Roy Bachmutsky: 02:12  Hi there. Thanks so much for having me. Really an honor to be on. I’ve been an avid listener for years, so it’s incredible to be with you.

Janet: 02:20  Great welcome. Roy did what I would encourage people to do. He sent kind of a ‘What About Us?’ message pointing out that Amnesty International, where he works, has a new corporate crimes handbook. It’s all about lessons learnt, how to tackle both the advocacy and the legal work around getting these kind of trials going. And to be honest, I mean, handbooks, I always think, meh, you know, who cares? But then I looked through it, and of course, I spotted Argentina again and again, and I thought, What is going on with this place? It has up the top of the handbook. If people want to have a look at it, we’ll put a link in with two summaries of cases. And I thought that I’d ask Steph, not as stephapedia, but as a reader of the summaries, to explain what these two cases are.

Stephanie: 03:10  So this is the summary from Amnesty, which also Janet has put in the script in the smallest possible font. One is Ford or former Ford, and this is Argentinian prosecutors indicted the accused who were convicted in 2018 for complicities in crimes against humanity, including torture and illegal deprivation of liberty committed by the Argentinian state authorities during the military dictatorship in the late 1970s as a result of the executives identifying workers and providing a space for their detention at the Ford facility near Buenos Aires. And these defendants were sentenced to over 10 years in prisons.

Janet: 03:50  And that case is still ongoing. The conviction was appealed, and it’s a case against the former director and security manager. What about the La Fronterita case, Steph, if you can read my incredibly small TypeScript

Stephanie: 04:05  In the La Fronterita case, it’s about the CEO and five other members of the Board of Directors of the La Fronterita Sugar Mill and the Argentinian prosecutors indicted these accused in 2012 for complicity in crimes against humanity, including alleged killings, tortured and enforced disappearances, again committed by the Argentinian state authorities during the period of its military dictatorship in the 1970s and the 1980s and again, this as a result of the executives identifying workers, supplying company owned vehicles to military personnel and granting military access to company facilities. It says also, four of the six persons originally accused are no longer part of the proceedings due to death or illness, and they name an NGO Andhes, which represents the family members and one of the victims in the case and has participated in the criminal proceedings. It’s an ongoing case, and it is proceeding to trial. 

Janet: 05:00  So joining us alongside Roy is Gabriel Pereira, hi Gabriel.

Gabriel Pereira: 05:05  Hi both. Thank you very much for inviting us to this podcast. It’s quite an honor to be here. 

Why pursue cases now? 

Janet: 05:11  And Gabriel is directly connected to that La Fronterita case, because he’s the lead attorney for the Argentine human rights organization that you mentioned Steph, Andhes, and he also worked on the corporate crimes handbook, and he was particularly looking at overseeing the kind of lessons learned across all of the Latin American cases that are summarized there. I know this was a really long intro, but I hope that by just getting all of that stuff down, we can just get into the heart of the matter. So I wanted to start with you, Gabriel, to say, I mean, I think it’s pretty obvious as a question, these are all crimes from the 1970s and 1980s, understood that was a very difficult and important time, this dictatorship in Argentina. But why are you still pursuing these, I mean, it’s nearly half a century later, and as we’ve already seen, some defendants have died, and really they’re pretty old. So what are you up to?

Gabriel Pereira: 06:12  These cases are part of what we call and has been established by the Argentine Supreme Court. They are part of the systematic plan of perpetration of crime against humanities during the last dictatorship. So these two cases are part of an universe of around 26 criminal cases which are still ongoing in Argentina. And we are now litigating those cases, because we couldn’t do it before due to amnesty laws and pardons during the 80s. So Argentina started what we call the transitional justice process in the early 80s, and due to military pressure, two amnesty laws and several pardons were passed at the late 80s. So during the 90s, we have the what we call the impunity period, and it was not only until the early 21st century in which the Supreme Court ruled the amnesty law as unconstitutional. Before the Supreme Court ruling, there were some pronunciation by the Inter American Commission of Human Rights. There were some trials taking place in Mexico, Italy, France, US and other countries in which Argentine military officers were convicted for perpetration of crimes humanities. So the thing is that in 2005, when the Supreme Court ruled the unconstitutionality of the amnesty law, was a moment which they reopened the trial phase, in a way, so we could restart cases on that point. The thing is that in that particular moment, the trials which were reopened, they were directed, the accusation were against state officers. But there was kind of a very important push from human rights movements to widen our approach of what state terrorism means in Latin American dictatorship.

Janet: 08:25  So first round is state but you wanted to push it a bit further. What were you pushing for?

Gabriel Pereira: 08:32  We push for corporate complicity. You know, the idea that this crime against humanity were committed, not only in terms of political repression, but also as part of economic interest. So there is where many human rights activists and survivors started pushing the cases against economic actors, and this is part of the discussion that we have today, the legal strategy has been to include the behavior of private actors as part of the systematic plan. So the challenge is to show that what they did was a crucial element of a series of events that were part of this systematic plan that occurred in Argentina to commit crimes against humanity during the 70s, early 80s. That’s the reason that we are litigating those cases now. This because we couldn’t do it earlier, even though the truth commission in Argentina in the 80s, already reported seven companies as part of the systematic plan development during the dictatorship.

How NGOs can aid in bringing cases forward

Stephanie: 09:50  That’s a lot of things that you’re saying at the same time. Let’s pick up one element of that and get Roy in here. Roy, Amnesty International the organization, to set it apart from the amnesty laws that Gabriel was all talking about, as an amicus in the Fronterita case, has argued that the delay that it took so long for this case to actually come forward was an added violation of human rights. Can you tell us a little bit about how that submission went and how it helped in the case?

Roy Bachmutsky: 10:20  Maybe I’ll say up front that when we’re talking about the delay in that amicus brief that we filed, we’re referring to the delay after, I think Gabriel said 2005, when kind of these proceedings began. It’s now 2026, so we’re decades down the line. Our strategy in submitting that amicus brief in the La Fronterita case was, was twofold. So first, we wanted the Argentinian court to know that the international community in this case, Amnesty International, was observing the case, and that the court’s decision will be subject to public scrutiny. So our partners at Andhes explained that after many years of delays in the criminal procedures, culminating in a need to confirm the charges in the indictment against the corporate executives for the second time, there were concerns about irregularities in the way this was being adjudicated. Essentially the legal process was stuck, and some judges may have preferred it that way. And we at Amnesty believe that sunlight is the best disinfectant. So more important than what exactly we argued is the fact that we argued it, and we’re seen to be paying close attention to the case. And second, we wanted the Argentinian court to be aware of Argentina’s obligation to provide effective remedy for human rights violations, and as such, the risk of further delay in the proceedings had already been ongoing for decades, would mean that Argentina may be failing to provide effective remedy, as it’s required to under international law. In terms of how our amicus brief helped, I mean, I defer to Gabriel, because he was involved in the litigation more directly than I was, but my impression was that the La Fronterita case proceeded to trial soon after our filing, and I can’t say for sure what role our filing played in that decision. It’s hard to get into the judge’s heads. Maybe Gabriel has a better sense. But interestingly, the company’s defense lawyers seemed confirmed by our brief, and that’s generally quite telling. They responded by claiming that the intervention of various NGOs, including Amnesty, demonstrated the defense in that case was disadvantaged in the litigation by having to fend off the state prosecutors and the victims lawyers and the NGOs, and they saw that as demonstrating that the process was unfair to them, which I find fascinating, because typically we like to think of the power dynamic there between well resourced companies and communities that are harmed as sort of a David and Goliath, and in a way, I think the defense’s reaction captures perfectly, sort of the winning strategy in these kinds of cases, which is to try to build power through cooperation between affected communities, civil society and law enforcement. And I think that hopefully we had some success. Maybe Gabriel has more to share on that. 

Gabriel Pereira: 13:04  Yeah, I would like to highlight a point about the amicus and the issue of delay. As Roy said, the amicus and our claims about the undue delays in the case are not related to or exactly connected to what happened before 2005. We are saying that most of the different judges who were involved in the case, they are not advancing the case, and they are provoked in some human rights violation in terms of access to justice, but from the beginning of the investigation, and that’s something relevant to to give you an element of context, most of the defendants in this type of cases, transitional justice cases, either state officers or private defendants, they are reaching a point where they are getting unfit to stand on trial or they pass away. So the there is an inertia that has been even denounced by the Attorney General Office, in which some judges prefer not to move forward the cases. So no getting to conviction, not getting to a point where they say that the defendant are innocent of any charges, so they put the cases in what we call a stop motion. You know where things move, but when you see the long term, they are not moving. That’s the strategy. We claim from some judges, that they prefer not to move the cases, but they know that if they get to a point where they released from charges to the defendant, they will get a lot of a negative repercussion in the public debate, so they shelf the cases in a way to avoid public exposure and also some political and economic pressure. So the amicus was very timely because we reached a point where we got to an Appeal Tribunal to decide on the issue of delay, and there was no further tribunal to review this. So their Amnesty, another the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights from Germany and some Argentine NGOs, they put a lot of pressure there. And we here in Argentina, we develop, devise a media campaign also to pressure. That’s review now pressure, in a good sense, to get to unblock the case. So it’s important we call in Argentina the biological full stop. Full stop would mean no more trials, but not because of legal reasons, only for biological reasons, you know, because the defendant get unfit to stand on trial. So I think that is important to have in mind why it was so relevant this moment on the proceedings.

Stephanie: 15:59  So from that, what would you say Gabriel, the kind of general lessons that other organizations or NGOs that want to pursue this kind of legal action against corporate crimes should take, because this is a specific example with Argentina, but we see the same kind of thing replicated in other countries. What would you say the most important thing is that you learned about how to do this cases and when to call in kind of the big guns. Big Guns. Yeah, I want auxiliary troops. I had the Dutch word for auxiliary troops in my brain, and couldn’t get to the English so that yeah, when to call in the big guns, and get this kind of outside perspective, and also avoid being seen as an NGO that is kind of driven by outside interest, which also never plays well, or, you know, sometimes used against NGOs.

Gabriel Pereira: 16:51  And I think that there are many lessons, but one important thing is that Latin America has at least around 60 or 70 ongoing cases related to corporate crimes in different cases. So is there most prophetic region in terms of prosecuting cases related to gross human rights violations committed in the context of dictatorship or civil conflicts. That tells something. One of the lesson from Fronterita and those cases is that courts in the judiciaries on the global south are very active, not because maybe the judges, but because there is some kind of capacity within human rights movements to push forward these type of cases, and those cases are usually connected to the traditional transitional justice cases. So human rights NGOs advocating for these cases are also people who have been prosecuting on pushing forward cases for the last 20 years, even during the impunity times in many of the Latin American countries. So the lesson is that when you have a national human right movement in partnership with international NGOs, and you can devise coordinated strategies. Things could be very, very beneficial to create this bubble in which judges or public prosecutors were when they are not very active in prosecuted cases. They see around the bubble, and they say different actors look and then from outside, from media, from your neighbors and regular local people who are based on the city where you are prosecuting. So I think that the lessons is not too nice in the sense that it takes time and a lot of resources and efforts, but also it shows that some coordination between what we already have here in Latin America and also what we have at the international level could play a very interesting role pushing forward cases.

Janet: 19:17  Roy, you wanted to join in with your answer also.

Roy Bachmutsky: 19:20  Yeah, I just wanted to follow up on that and mention that in addition to the really important lesson that Gabriel just mentioned, another kind of corollary to that is that the value of cooperation between both local, international civil society and law enforcement, where appropriate. Now it’s, there are circumstances where law enforcement is entirely adversarial or it’s too risky to engage with them. But on the whole, my sense is that law enforcement in Latin American jurisdictions are far more willing to engage with civil society than, for instance, their counterparts in Europe and the United States. There’s a pervasive culture in the global north of law enforcement being totally independent and apolitical, which is important, but taken to an extreme. It could be. It could actually harm the prospect of them bringing these kinds of cases, because they miss out on incredibly valuable sources of information, of evidence, of leads that comes out of civil society actors and out of potential cooperation with them, and I get the sense that there’s far more openness to engagement with law enforcement in Argentina, in Brazil, in Colombia that has led to this proliferation of cases that Gabriel is talking about.

Truth Commissions and Evidence 

Stephanie 20:37  A lot of these cases seem to also be based on evidence coming from truth commissions and these kind of national proceedings to get to a certain joint history. Can you, either one of you say something about the importance of those kind of Truth Commission findings? Could that also be a reason why, for example, South America, you see a lot more of these actions, because you have this basis of this truth commission where part of that was already hashed out, and that is not so prevalent in Western Europe yet.

Gabriel Pereira: 21:10  I think that partially, yes, for example, in the case of Brazil, you can see a very strong Truth Commission which collected lots of information about corporate accountability or the corporate complicity, and you have more or less 160 mentions of private actors contributing to the Brazilian dictatorship. So that is huge. And then after that, that information was used by the public prosecutor office and unions and workers organizations to push forward some cases. Brazil, in this moment, has at least 12 prosecutions against companies, and we can talk later about Brazil, which is a real case due to the legal system. Then you have Colombia. Colombia had its truth commission report two years ago, and the corporate complicity cases received the truth commission, and actually the truth commission collected information based on the prosecution that were investigated through the different transitional justice mechanism that they had in Colombia. And the third example is, is Argentina, where you have the truth commission that collected information, for example, about the Ford case, but in other cases, no, that is the partial response, partial Yes. The other thing is that how valuable is collecting evidence through any state mechanism, not only truth commission, for example, for the Fronterita case, our strategy was to select the case La Fronterita and the type of claims that we would push forward in court based on previous trials against actors, where some evidence was collected for those trials against the state actor, but they were useful to prosecute private actors. And what we did, we sit with a bunch of researchers to go through all the past files of different trials and review what we could get there. So the evidence that you can collect in the past, and that goes through an institutional state agency give you much more leverage. So either trials, truth commissions, some report by, you know, stock exchange agencies, money laundering agencies, so on, so forth, they collect a lot of information. So what we learn is that to commit crimes against humanities in a systematic way requires money and support, and the State keep track of that support, either financial or physical. The information is somewhere so when you can research that, because imagine, to implement a clandestine detention center, you need some infrastructure, you need someone to put the lights, you need someone to clean the place. So you need to say that you need x money to do something, and that is somewhere in the state. So it is very important to think that the evidence, part of the case, doesn’t start during the trial. It starts very earlier, and you have to be strategic from where you can withdraw, from truth commission, other trials, or other type of state reports,

Janet: 24:57  Roy building on what Gabriel’s just outlined. I’m wondering, what kind of evidence do you see is needed to make one of these cases a success? I mean, I’m thinking particularly about linkage evidence, because you’re trying to go for the very top of an organization. We know how difficult that is in the International Criminal tribunals that we cover when they’re looking at a top army or a top political leader and and then, you know, it’s things like insider witnesses, it’s documentation, etc. Can you talk us through what is needed in these cases?

Roy Bachmutsky: 25:33  Obviously, we’re talking about criminal cases which have the highest evidentiary standard. Eventually, if a prosecution goes forward, they would need to convict beyond a reasonable doubt, and so you need to have really strong evidence, as you said, linkage evidence that links the particular corporate perpetrator to crime base or to what maybe in this case, if it’s a complicity case, what the state was actually perpetrating.

Janet: 25:59  Roy, can I just ask you to really come in there a bit more also on, because I have, in my mind, it’s what I’m used to, is that they should have had reason to know, that’s often with a kind of a senior military person, that they didn’t stop somebody from doing something that’s, that’s enough, is that the same in these kind of cases, not only that they either they might know, but they should have known, or that they should have stopped people, or they should have punished people, or something like that, is that also the same kind of basic in this kind of case? 

Roy Bachmutsky: 26:32  Standards vary depending on the law in a particular jurisdiction, but generally, if we’re talking about international crimes, what you’d have to show is some sort of knowledge or intent. I don’t think typically should have known, is not good enough to put a corporate perpetrator in prison, and therefore you have to figure out what they actually knew or what they actually intended, and that requires getting into the mind of what was going on within the corporate act or within the corporation, and that’s when you get into things like what Gabriel was talking about, how do we get access to documents that typically are guarded from within the company, and that can be done in certain ways, through truth commissions, through other kind of state’s access to evidence, could be disclosure and all sorts of civil litigation. Sometimes we’ve had documents come out in civil litigation that are then used in prosecutions, and sometimes that involves an inside witness that can tell you what was going on there. I worked on a case for quite some time where actually a shareholder in a company served as an inside witness about exactly what the senior management of the company knew and intended was going on. It’s not easy to collect the evidence for these kinds of cases, but it’s also it’s doable, and I think a lot of organizations are doing that really important work. And you’d be surprised how much civil society can collect. Obviously, we don’t have law enforcement powers. We can’t go in and and tell a company that we got a search warrant. We got to search their entire offices. That’s the prosecutor’s job. But at the end of the day, there’s a lot that we can do and and we’ve got to essentially persuade law enforcement to issue that search warrant. So we got to get them, give them a sense that there’s something worth looking at, that there’s really something illegal that that this company was involved in

Stephanie: 28:19  Gabriel. You want to jump in. 

Gabriel Pereira: 28:20  In general terms, we talk about corporate complicity and the legal terms of complicity tell us something. But there are other cases that they are not necessarily complicity. They are primary actors. For example, the cases in Chile, actually, Chile was, I think, the first country in Latin America convicting an economic actor. And those cases, there are a series of five cases the private actors they were primary responsible of the crimes committed, because they were at the moment where the torture, the killings or the disappearance took place. And then in Colombia, there are cases about a legal partnership ‘asociación ilícita’, we said in Spanish, so the legal approach is different across the region. But coming back to the complicity and the secondary altar, and the intent and knowledge, one issue at dispute is whether the knowledge and intent is about the systematic human rights violation plan, or whether is the discussion about the specific crime against humanity that took place around the case. That’s part of the legal dispute in cases like the Fronterita. 

There is a huge distinction about the evidence to prove the two different things – that’s one issue. And then there is another take on issue that is connected to intent and knowledge. Is that the defendant could argue that they have their hand tied. Look, they were a dictatorship. They were the ruler of the war, and they put a gun in our head, so I can do nothing. So then they have this kind of defense. So the question there is, how much you contributed to the commission of the crime. They’re the dictatorship, because you have to remember that forced disappearances are part of a continuous in time, the defendant has provide information to truth commissions, they report to the authorities what happened during the dictatorship, what that was the behavior. So that’s another discussion that takes you not only to the moment, when we talk about moment, we are talking about the years of the commission of the crimes, but also the behavior of the defendant afterwards, and their intent and knowledge plays another role in the legal strategy.

Reparations for Survivors in Latin America 

Stephanie: 31:01  We’re talking a lot about the people on trial and how you get there and different perpetrators, but very central in your proceedings are the survivors who are also, and the NGOs pushing these proceedings forward. What are the survivors asking for, and what can they ask for? In the Netherlands, I see, when I see these cases, mainly against the Dutch state, sometimes they have damages claims, but they’re always very limited. The Dutch law system doesn’t allow these massive American damage claims. So I wonder what survivors can get in kind of Latin American or Argentinian accord. Specifically, if we’re talking about Gabriel’s case ?

Gabriel Pereira: 31:44  In general terms, most of the cases in Argentina and in Latin America, they go through the criminal justice process. So what you can get is very limited. There is conviction there, but with some caveats. The human rights movement in Latin America has learned that criminal convictions are also restorative justice in the sense that they tell you about something, and that’s official history established by the tribunal. So for example, someone would say the case of my mother, who was disappeared, never got into court, but there is a ruling about the neighbor, and that is justice for me. You know, there is a sense of restorative justice.

So what most, or many people claim is that they want conviction, but they want the state, a court say that there is a person who was guilty, that they know who were the perpetrators and what were the situation of these under the crimes were committed. And of course, most of the people who have this disappeared relative, they want to know the whereabouts of the bodies. But in general sense is like what we expect is conviction as a means to get something else, which is much more restorative justice. And actually criminal rulings across the country, which included many restorative justice measures in the text of the ruling like memorializations, acts of, you know, putting in the media that the X or Y was not killed in a regular killing, it was an illegal killing, so on so forth. So there is something there of how much we can get strong criminal prosecution to make, to make it less retributive to much more restorative. It is a challenge, but it’s part of the claims around the this type, this type of cases.

Janet: 33:49  Roy, you’ve got your hand up again. 

Roy Bachmutsky: 33:52  Yeah just wanted to add a little point and just say that, you know, this is something we look at very closely in the corporate crimes handbook, and we interviewed a bunch of survivors of corporate crimes, and we talked to them about whether the cases really provided them what they needed. And one of the things that we concluded as a lesson learned from these kinds of cases is the importance for legal practitioners to really have a community centered approach, where they listen to what the survivors actually need, and not just rush to any jerk reaction of, let’s initiate, let’s file a criminal complaint. Because it could be that, in many cases, a criminal complaint may not lead to what the survivors are looking for, but in many cases, a lot of the survivors that we spoke to wanted an opportunity to be in a courtroom and have that senior corporate executive there explain themselves, explain their conduct. Why did they engage in business that armed the community in this way? And there was some accountability just through the legal procedure of doing that. And there was also in many jurisdictions, opportunities for for getting compensation, for having asset forfeiture that leads to, then some, some damages that are provided depending on the jurisdiction. So it really depends on what communities are looking for. Obviously, some communities may just want the company to stop. Maybe the company is continuing to engage in these violations today, and maybe a proceeding will get them to reconsider.

Increasing Litigation Cases Worldwide

Janet: 35:25  Roy we heard from Gabriel, how many cases there have been going on across Latin America. So, you know, kind of leading continent, let’s say. But are they, are they having an influence worldwide? Are they being seen as examples of how to do this?

Roy Bachmutsky: 35:41  Yeah, it’s a really good question, because from everything I know in the field, I agree entirely with Gabriel, and he’s essentially the authority on this, literally wrote the book on it, but that Latin America is sort of a leading region in terms of corporate crimes cases, in the amount of cases brought, in the success and impact that they’re having, and it’s really not even close. So the rest of the world has much to learn from Latin America, and yet I find that many of my colleagues in the US and Europe often have not heard about these cases. And so we at Amnesty thought it was really important to change that by highlighting them prominently in the handbook, and by trying to bridge the gap between practitioners in Latin American jurisdictions and practitioners in the Global North. And we do that in a variety of different ways. The handbook is just one of them. We organize convenings, we bring folks together. And I think that we’re starting to see that there’s a growing appreciation among both European lawyers in civil society and in law enforcement, that it’s worth taking a close look at what’s happening in Latin America.

Stephanie 36:49  Aren’t you Gabriel, also seeing that now with Lafarge and the Lundin cases, all of a sudden, your expertise as someone who has done this in Latin America is a bit more sought after, or should, are european prosecutors and lawyers try a little harder to find you, because you can teach them a few things. 

Gabriel Pereira: 37:08  I don’t think that they will have too many things to teach, at least to exchange a learning process. Actually, I think that from 2014/15, a very powerful but still emerging community of legal practitioners, academics, has been working together in Latin America and in Europe. I remember the first time that I got involved. I was a postdoc at University of Oxford, we got some funding. 12 years after we have many cases, and those cases, you name them, but then you can track several meetings in which we were participating to discuss the Lafarge case and the Lundin case. Actually, I was with people from the Lundin case last November, and they were talking about Fronterita. So there is a subtle community which is going on there, the lawyers from Chiquita and the US, we know very well to each other. We know the prosecutors in Brazil. We know the historians in Spain, which are pushing and working with lawyers to get what they call the ‘querellas’ about forced labor and corporate complicity in Spain. So there is a community there. So I don’t think that there are many things to teach. It’s much more to exchange. And the contexts are quite different, because we in Latin America, most of the cases, not all, but many of the cases are going through the criminal path with individual accused or defendants. And in Europe, but there is much opportunities to play with not individual requisition, but corporate criminal approaches. And then you have lead aid in the UK through going through damages, which is quite interesting as well. So the legal approach is changed a lot, but what we are learning is that the strategies, the mobilization strategies around the courts, are very similar. And there is a lot of similarities and strategies that we can share, and a lot of knowledge exchange going on there, which is very profitable. And I think that we got to a point where I can say that a subfield of transitional justice and a subfield of Business and Human Rights has been created over the last 20 years, and that is the corporate crimes field, related to crimes against humanity in general, with the particularly tone on civil conflict and authoritarian governments. 

Asymmetrical Haircuts Questions

Janet: 40:08  We only have so much time to devote to the podcast each time, and it’s never long enough, because there’s plenty more questions that we would like to ask, but we’re going to kind of begin the wrapping up now. The first question we like to ask is, is there something that you wanted to have said that you haven’t had a chance to do so? do want to push Gabriel a little bit towards in his answer, if it’s possible to tell us also what’s going on with the La Fronterita case at the moment, you know what we should expect. So maybe start with you. Roy. What? What else would you have wanted to say if we’d given you much more time?

Roy Bachmutsky: 40:45  Well, I mean, there’s so much to say. We’ve covered plenty of ground, but we could talk about this for hours, and for now, I’d just leave listeners with sort of the biggest lesson learned from our study of corporate crimes cases, which is that there’s hope for overcoming the impunity that companies generally experience, but that hope comes from cooperation that affected communities, civil society, legal practitioners and where appropriate law enforcement officials can come together and hold the perpetrators of corporate crime accountable. That’s really the key. And to learn more about how to do that, I’d encourage listeners to have a read of the handbook, and also please feel free to write to me in any way. Find me on LinkedIn. One of the things that Amnesty does is support organizations developing these kinds of cases, and so we’d be more than happy to speak with you and to find ways that we could support your important work.

Janet: 41:39  Okay, touting for business. There we go. Well done. Gabriel.

Gabriel Pereira: 41:43  Okay. I will be very short, I promise. I think that the main issue here, and my main interest at these times, is the Fronterita case. We have been waiting for the tribunal to set the date of the start of the trial, the proper hearings, for two years. So you can imagine that the tribunal takes two years to tell you when you start with the hearing. Imagine what is the mind and the heart of the victims and survivors – for two years – after 10 years of prosecution. So the Fronterita case needs some support to pressure the tribunal to set the date. We had the what we call the preliminary hearing in December. Just before to start preliminary hearing, a judge withdraw himself from the tribunal, only one minute before starting the hearing. That means that there is no willingness to put forward so now, after the preliminary hearing, we are waiting Appeal Tribunal to decide to appoint a new judge. So things are, you know, it’s like crazy. So we are at the moment where we feel that we need that support, and the local tribunal knows that someone is watching at them. And in this political context in which national governments across Latin America are tending to be more right wing leaning. They know that authorities are not going to make this tribunal accountable. So it is civil society and media which has the key role to make them accountable for setting or not the date to start with a trial. I’m not talking about a ruling. I’m talking about that we want to get them on trial.

Stephanie: 43:47  Yeah, you would think that a trial date is the least that that you can expect. But yeah, obviously, from how you explain it, that’s not always how things go, especially in some of the countries we cover. Thank you both so much for telling us all of this. I know there is much more you would like to have said, but we’d like to keep it to the about 45 minutes, but we do always end our podcast with our asymmetrical haircuts questions, and I am still touting one that I came up with that Janet is not entirely sure of, and that is that I would ask you what you kind of your first job was, not necessarily in the field, but if, or if you have a job that was really foundational to what you do, or something that has nothing to do with the field. I’m asking this question also to show people that you can get to international law and reporting on it, or being a lawyer from very many different angles, and we don’t all have to be, you know, interning for some kind of judge on the first go, but we can also do lots of other things and still end up doing this job. So that is kind of the context of this question. So Gabriel, is there any job that you’ve had or have that would qualify as a fun story or an inspirational story.

Gabriel Pereira: 45:05  Thank you. One of my key jobs in my career at the very beginning was to work for a tax agency, provincial tax agency in Tucumán, because they gave me a salary so I could spend most of my day working on human rights. But after I ended my job in the tax agency, you know, at that moment, being an activist didn’t get you a salary. So having a securing salary, working for six hours for them allowed me to start my career as a human rights activist. So I the tax revenue agency was crucial for me.

Janet: 45:48  Thank you to the tax revenue agency for keeping you going Gabriel. Roy.   

Roy Bachmutsky: 45:53  Yeah, I mean, my first job was, was as a college student, as a bartender. So I don’t know what kind of inspiring story that is, but I’d say the job that that best kind of shaped the career that I have today is is actually that I founded my own organization, the Global Echo Litigation Center, a number of years ago that brings strategic litigation against companies involved in human rights violations in occupied Palestinian territory. And I think that this is a route that I wouldn’t recommend to everyone, but it’s interesting to work in sort of the Human Rights startup space, and I learned a lot from that experience. So you know, for those of you that are up for the challenges of doing that and the incredibly long hours, then maybe that’s a direction you’d like to explore.

Janet: 46:40  And we also always like to ask our contributors, what are they reading or listening to or watching that they would like to recommend? It can be something in the field or it can be something that you use to get away from the field. Let’s start with you Roy.

Roy Bachmutsky: 46:55  Well, I don’t know how the other lawyers do it, but ever since law school, I’ve had trouble reading for enjoyment. So I do more of listening, listening to podcasts like asymmetrical haircuts and audio books. Lately, I’ve been listening to Ronen Bergman’s book, ‘Rise and Kill First’. It’s about Israel’s history of targeted assassinations. So maybe different than the corporate context, but still in the Human Rights space. Or, you know, as we call assassinations of amnesty, extrajudicial killings, essentially feels all the more relevant today, as we see Israel’s policy of extrajudicial killings kind of expanding without end in recent years. And so it’s a really interesting history of it that not only touches on ethical or legal issues, but also just whether this policy is effective in any way.

Stephanie: 47:39  Gabriel, what is on your nightstand, or are you only reading for work?

Gabriel Pereira: 47:44  No, I’m reading right now, biographies. I like to do, read biographies. I would like to write biographies at some point, particularly those biographies without no happy end, the dark part of the story of people: Virginia Woolf, Jorge Luis Borges, José Ingenieros, in particular. I like writers, mostly, you know, and to to understand the, the sequence of failure, you know, that supposedly failure. So that’s, that’s my inspiration at night.  

Stephanie: 48:21  Oh, wow. So you’re reading about essentially failing upwards, or using failure to write the heartbreakingly beautiful literature. Well, I guess in a field where we encounter sometimes a lot of failure, that might be it’s maybe a good inspiration that is, it’s one way of going about getting inspiration.

Janet: 48:38  Good and challenging suggestions. So Gabriel and Roy, thank you for making time on a Friday afternoon towards the end of January, and we really appreciate that you are prepared to be asked all of these kind of questions, because it’s not everybody who wants to have journalists poking around and trying to understand better what they’re doing. So we appreciate you making the time.

Roy Bachmutsky: 49:04  Thanks again for having us, and we really appreciate your interest in this work, and look forward to seeing the podcast episode come on. 

Stephanie: 49:12 Thank you guys. Bye.

[OUTRO TUNE]

This was asymmetrical haircuts, your international justice podcast, created and presented by Janet Anderson and Stephanie van den Berg in partnership with the Hague Humanity Hub. You can find show notes and everything about the podcast on asymmetricalhaircuts.com. This show is available on every major podcast service, so please subscribe, give us a rating and spread the word.