Professor Celia Wells joins an distinguished international line-up of speakers at the Conference on Corporate War Crimes: Prosecuting Pillage of Natural Resources held at The Peace Palace, The Hague, Netherlands Oct. 29–30, 2010.  The illegal exploitation of natural resources has fuelled and financed brutal conflicts around the world, yet there has been little success to date in holding companies accountable for trafficking in conflict resources.  The conference, accompanying the Open Society Justice Initiative’s launch of a manual on prosecuting commercial actors for the war crime of pillage, is meant to foster renewed public debate about how the law can—and should—be used against companies whose theft of natural resources has driven conflict.

Celia researches and writes mainly in criminal law with a particular specialism in corporate criminal liability. She is the author of Corporations and Criminal Responsibility (2nd edition OUP 2001) and of Reconstructing Criminal Law (with Nicola Lacey and Oliver Quick, 4th edition, Cambridge University Press, 2010). Her work has been influential in the development of an organisational theory of corporate criminal liability and she has provided expert advice on corporate criminal responsibility to a number of national and international bodies including the International Commission of Jurists’ Expert Legal Panel on Corporate Complicity in International Crimes (2006).