The Corporate Liability and Sustainable Peace (CLASP) Lab

Historically, transitional justice processes around the world have failed to hold corporate actors accountable, leaving impacted communities without redress, maintaining abusive power structures, and undermining sustainable peace by preventing a full reckoning with the past. The Corporate Liability and Sustainable Peace Lab (CLASP Lab) is a cross-jurisdictional “social lab” to advance corporate accountability in post-conflict settings. A blog post explaining further is available in English, Spanish, and French. Social labs use an experimental and systemic approach to complex social problems and draw on design thinking processes and mindsets. The CLASP Lab was established to articulate, analyze, and address through strategy innovation the pattern of impunity companies have enjoyed for contributing to human rights and environmental abuses, for example by financing armed groups, in conflict settings.

CAL co-convenes the CLASP Lab with the African Coalition for Corporate Accountability, Dejusticia, and the Comisión Intereclesial de Justicia y Paz. The Lab is a massive and unique endeavor with more than 30 members-- both social justice lawyers and impacted community members-- from about 25 countries, specifically chosen for their experience working on post-conflict corporate accountability. CLASP Lab members participate virtually via Zoom in English, Spanish, and French. Some participants are members of our partner organizations, such as Poder, EarthRights International, the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre, and the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights. Our vision is to learn from each other’s work to hold companies accountable in order to not duplicate efforts, replicate effective strategies, and make progress collectively.

Through 2021, the full CLASP Lab met on a monthly basis to discuss case studies of corporate harm in conflict settings, report on strategy design progress, and build transnational solidarity through articulation and analysis of historical impunity patterns. Additionally, members met frequently in sub-groups to do the bulk of the CLASP Lab’s design thinking work, which included developing, prototyping, and testing new strategies for corporate accountability for abuses in the context of conflict. The CLASP Lab is divided into a Litigation Team, Post-Transitional Justice Processes Team, Transitional Justice Mechanism Design Team, and an Impacted Community-Centered Remedy Team. Bringing together lawyers from different jurisdictions allows for cross-pollination and for advocates to learn what has and has not worked in other jurisdictions for corporate accountability post-conflict and to innovate together. This year-long collaboration has sprouted “Prototypes” -- ideas and legal strategies that will now be tried and tested in the real world. Lab members’ strategies currently in development include an early alert system for communities in situations of conflict, a universal jurisdiction project, a program to train grassroots groups on evidence-gathering techniques, and prosecutorial specialization in transitional justice and implementation of institutions’ recommendations. A collective CLASP Lab Library including relevant jurisprudence, legal documents, and other information is currently under construction.