Corporate Manslaughter: International Perspectives

This paper examines the way in which laws on corporate manslaughter operate in the UK, Australia and Canada. It considers how each jurisdiction has grappled with the challenges of framing legislation to encompass corporate liability for the deaths of workers or members of the public. The three countries have a shared legal heritage and all experienced obstacles with the common law focus on identifying a directing mind within complex corporate structures. It was the failure of the common law to identify the controlling mind within the company and to successfully link that culpability to that of the organisation that led to the defeat of successive prosecutions. Typically, the litany of failed prosecutions involved large organisations with complex management structures where decision making was delegated along complex lines of management. This ‘fault line’ in the common law led to legislative reform in the three jurisdictions. Each country has developed statutory responses which while similar, do contain important distinctive characteristics. The paper provides a comparative analysis of the manner in which these countries have tackled what is sometimes referred to as ‘corporate killing’