Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Violence Victims' Rights in Italy. A Long and Winding Road

Corporate violence is a form of corporate deviance which causes deaths, injuries, or illnesses to people by way of illegal behaviours occurring in the course of the legitimate activity of an organisation. Notwithstanding a long history of industrial accidents and environmental disasters, Italy came late (in 2001) to introducing a system of (substantially) criminal (albeit formally administrative) liability for legal persons in cases of organisational crime, and even later (in 2007) to extending said responsibility to corporate manslaughter. Even today, though, corporate responsibility for the negligent causation of human deaths, or serious injuries, remains quite limited in scope (especially when compared to extended corporate quasi-criminal liability for offences which do not involve such serious harms), and its enforcement is limited by a set of structural features, as we will illustrate through one recent and notorious case. This, coupled with the partial and unsystematic implementation, in Italy, of Directive 2012/29/EU, undermines an actual recognition and implementation of the rights of victims of corporate violence, who, on the one hand, can frequently be qualified as ‘vulnerable’ within the meaning of the Directive, but, on the other, still suffer from a structural lack of recognition, information, support, and protection.