i missed this back in july, amidst all of the kerfuffle. it's sort of big news.

next step? hopefully? criminal charges, under the war crimes act. this has to be the end point.

a negligence case may get some compensation out to the victims, but this sort of thing doesn't act as a useful deterrent because most of the negligence is actual criminal. what ends up happening is that the companies work the cost of rape and genocide into their analysis. what also happens is that they finish the job. if leaving a survivor behind in the village is going to cost them, there will be less survivors. the cost of being "caught committing genocide" works it's way into whether or not developing this field or that mine is profitable. this is the logic of capital, and if the aim is to find ways to contain and regulate it then we need to move beyond liberal naivete.

i wrote an essay about a year ago explaining that there actually isn't any need to rewrite the laws relating to jurisdiction. the war crimes act (http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/c-45.9/) has the proper jurisdiction to convict upper management of genocide, rape and the other accusations. it's technically international law, even; that's just the version that was passed as domestic law. the state just isn't using it....

http://dominion.mediacoop.ca/story/end-impunity/18874