“Profits Over Humanity: Lafarge, Terror Financing, and the Failure of International Law” -By Fransiscus Nanga Roka

A scandal around financing armed groups for a multinational corporation like Lafarge, found guilty of doing so in relation to ISIS is not simply corporate,  it is systemic. It is not an anomaly. It is a revelation.

Because the most disturbing realisation is that this

It was not so much that the global legal order prevented this, it allowed it.

Lafarge was not working in a vacuum. It moved in an international economic regime that rewards rent-seeking while offloading the moral burden. Preserving access to markets in Syria came with negotiating terms of agreement (often paying off armed groups) and continuing production at all, even if such an effort involved circumstances that perpetuated violence through the logistics created by outreach on goods.

It is not a story of one rogue firm.

It is the tale of a system which normalises moral failing in the pursuit of profit.

For decades, multinationals have enjoyed the comforting fiction that business is neutral. That corporations simply behave in environments defined by states and wars they have no control over. That we can read the economic activity independently from its moral consequences.

Lafarge destroys that illusion.

It is essentially militarized hire, the corporation chooses self interest over neutrality when it pays armed groups to provide operational continuity. The distinction between commerce and complicity evaporates when those payments are providing the means for entities that commit mass atrocities to stay in business.

However, international law long ago has failed to break meaningfully that fiction. Corporate liability is still fragmented, not uniform and usually takes a back seat to issues of jurisdiction. Multinationals act across borders; responsibility does not.

International law boasts with prohibiting the financing of terrorism. States criminalize it. Conventions condemn it. Sanctions regimes target it.

Now, here is the uncomfortable truth:

Those frameworks are aimed at individuals and states not so much for the times a condor showed up at your hedge fund oasis where firm level actors cushioned by different baskets of political risk, engaged impotently with society itself as just another market node deep within global supply chains.

Lafarge exploited precisely this gap.

The legal system only responded in hindsight, after the damage had been done, funds already moved, operations continued and complicity formed. This is not prevention. This is post hoc symbolism.

Even worse, enforcement remains selective. From material support, people may be prosecuted almost instantaneously; from corporations they will sue and settle the matter over years while negotiated accountability never head up.

A justice system that beheads the weak quickly and negotiates with the powerful slowly is hierarchy disguised as law.

So the Lafarge case reveals a more serious kind of pathology: profit as normalisation.

In the context of corporate decision making, we rarely talk about being ethical as a necessity. Payments become “risk management.” It becomes engagement with armed actors as “operational continuity. Harm becomes an externality.

But let us be clear: You can not defend a legal argument with profit. It is a motive. And when profit becomes the logic all its own, human rights become just one more variable: a cost to be minimized rather than an obligation honored.

That is where the limitations of international law set in their most terrible boundaries. It does not place enough ex ante limits on the behavior of corporate actors operating within conflict zones. It reacts to breaches but does not inhibit them structurally.

Far from vindicated, the Lafarge conviction is accountability and its limits.

Where are the systemic reforms?

Restrictions on corporations from engaging with sanctioned entities at all: Where are the global binding standards?

Where does the enforceable duty to apply due diligence have some serious consequences?

Guidelines, principles and corporate social responsibility in terms of voluntary frameworks have not been sufficient. They make it seem as if one is regulated but without the actual regulation.

Soft law will never prevent hard crime.

Until there is compulsory compliance and stringent enforcement, corporations will continue to play off the risk-reward dynamic and far too often profit will prevail.

The real indictment is not Lafarge alone. They are against a world order that allows companies to operate within armed struggle zones without legally enforceable human rights requirements. A legal systems that is behind to economic realities.

This is in opposition to a model of globalization that sees market access as more important than human life.

Because what transpired here is not unusual,  it was inevitable.

And predictability reliable law across a large swath of the legal universe is always the clearest symptom of structural failure.

The Normative Ultimatum

In order for international law to retain its credibility, it needs evolve from a reactive ‘punitive’ posture towards one of preventive accountability:

1. Binding corporate human rights obligations  not voluntary guidelines
2. Universal jurisdiction mechanisms for corporate complicsity in international crimes
3. Mandatory due diligence with criminal liability for non-compliance
4. Real-time enforcement, not retrospective condemnation

We are trained to do that without any of these cases like Lafarge will not be dashed but repeat.

The problem of a legal system that allows corporations to fund violence and calls it “business risk” is not simply one of failure; this notion itself legitimizes harm.

Because when profit overshadows humanity, and law is unable to reach

the market is not simply another space of conflict, it is tuned to become one of its motors.

A world where this is allowed, however, has no law. It is governed by complicity.

Fransiscus Nanga Roka

Faculty of Law University 17 August 1945 Surabaya Indonesia