When any multinational corporation is invested in a country with a tyrannical government, there are a number of legal questions that arise regarding its complicity in human rights abuses by that regime:
• Did the company’s conduct facilitate, exacerbate, or enable gross human rights violations?
• Did the company know, or should it have known that its conduct would likely contribute to gross human rights violations?
• Was the company in close proximity (geographically, or in terms of frequency, duration, or intensity of interaction) with the principal perpetrators of abuses?
In almost all of these questions, even if legal complicity cannot be proved, moral complicity is beyond question.
Whether we are talking about the genocide of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, or we are talking about the violent repression (including extrajudicial killings and arbitrary detention), in Egypt; at the very least, foreign investors are granting legitimacy to tyrannical regimes, expressing their approval of them, and tolerating their abuses when they have the economic and political power to stop them from occurring. The refusal to censure governments for their violations, by its very nature, facilitates, enables, and exacerbates the abuses. And yes, of course companies know that.
But beyond this, it can be convincingly argued that abuses are even more causally linked to foreign investors. For example, when a regime subordinates itself to the International Monetary Fund and agrees to implement neoliberal economic reforms that increase the suffering of the population in order to benefit big business, these policies are frequently forced upon the public by severe methods to preempt any popular unrest. Thus, gross human rights abuses are committed specifically for the sake of international investors. A regime terrorizes the public specifically to prevent them from interfering in any way with the interests of business, and you will find that the more they do this, the more investor confidence improves. When investors’ expressions of increased confidence in the business environment correlate to manifest increases in repression and violence, can there be any doubt of moral complicity?