PARIS— France's highest court will on Tuesday rule on
whether cement giant Lafarge should remain charged with complicity in crimes
against humanity over alleged payments made to Islamist extremists in Syria at
the height of the country's
civil war.
اضافة اعلان
The French company is suspected of paying nearly 13 million
euros to Daesh and other militant groups in 2013 and 2014 to keep its cement
factory in northern Syria running, long after other French firms had pulled out
of the war-torn country.
It is also accused of buying petrol from Daesh through
middlemen, violating an EU embargo on Syria.
Lafarge eventually left Syria in September 2014 after Daesh
seized its plant in Jalabiya, around 150km northeast of the regional capital
Aleppo.
Eight Lafarge executives, including former CEO Bruno
Laffont, have already been charged with financing a terrorist group and/or
endangering the lives of the cement-maker's former Syrian staff.
In November 2019, the Court of Appeal in Paris quashed the
crimes against humanity charges against the company but upheld the charges of
financing terrorism, violating an embargo and endangering the lives of others.
Eleven former employees of Lafarge Cement Syria challenged
that decision at the Court of Cassation, France's final court of appeal, with
the backing of two NGOs.
Lafarge, which merged in 2015 with Swiss group Holcim, has
acknowledged that its Syrian subsidiary paid middlemen to negotiate with armed
groups to allow the movement of staff and goods inside the war zone.
But it denies any responsibility for the money winding up in
the hands of terrorist groups and has fought to have the case dropped,
particularly the crime against humanity charges.
Keeping the factory going
Presenting arguments in the Court of Cassation on June 8,
Lafarge's lawyer Patrice Spinosi said the group's only aim had been "the
continuation of the cement factory's activity" and that it had no hand in
any "concerted plan to eliminate a civilian population".
The government's general counsel has also rejected the
charge of complicity in crimes against humanity but recommended trying Lafarge
for financing terrorism, saying the company could "not have been unaware
of the terrorist nature" of the groups that it paid off.
Lafarge is not the first multinational to be accused of
complicity in crimes against humanity over its activity in a country where
people suffered serious rights abuses. But such cases have rarely been brought
to trial.
Twelve Nigerians took Anglo-Dutch energy giant Shell to
court in the US, accusing it of abetting extra-judicial killings, torture,
rape, and crimes against humanity in the Niger Delta in the 1990s.
The US Supreme Court in 2013 dismissed the case, saying US
courts did not have jurisdiction in the matter.
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