Fadel Abdulghany
The ruling by the Paris Criminal Court on April 13, 2026, against Lafarge is a landmark event from a legal standpoint. However, for more than 190 former Syrian employees who participated as civil parties, it remains a formal ruling that does not lead to any compensation. Lafarge and four of its former senior executives were convicted of financing terrorism, specifically by paying approximately 5.5 million euros to armed groups, including the “Islamic State,” between 2013 and 2014, with the aim of keeping the company’s cement plant in northern Syria operational.
The court imposed the maximum fine on the company and handed down prison sentences ranging from three to six years to its executives. This conviction sets a precedent: it is the first time a French company has been found guilty of financing a terrorist organization, and the first time French courts have examined terrorism financing of this scale and institutional nature. However, the former Syrian employees—whose testimonies the court described as “powerful, precise, dignified, and humane”—left without any compensation, as the legal system that convicted their company offered them no recourse.
This ruling is part of a developing, albeit still controversial, legal framework. Alongside France’s 2017 Due Diligence Law and the EU’s 2024 Directive on Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence, this judgment represents a converging—though still incomplete—legal development toward establishing the principle of holding parent companies accountable for the conduct of their subsidiaries in conflict zones. The Lafarge ruling is likely to be cited as a benchmark in future prosecutions of European parent companies whose subsidiaries have financed or materially benefited from designated terrorist organizations. However, in assessing this ruling, it should be borne in mind that the conviction is subject to appeal—which is almost certain given the commercial and reputational risks—and that its precedent and deterrent effects can only be reliably assessed after the appeal process is exhausted.
The legal significance of the conviction lies primarily in how the court addressed the issue of attributing liability to companies. It found that decisions taken jointly at Lafarge’s headquarters in Paris and within its Syrian branch constituted the actual legal act, thereby breaching the structural separation between the parent company and the branch, a separation that multinational companies usually use as a shield against liability. The payments were not the result of local improvisation, but were systematically authorized, institutionally sanctioned, and directed through deliberate obfuscation mechanisms designed to conceal the beneficiaries. This conclusion directly challenges the assumption that the independent legal personality of the foreign branch ends the inquiry into the liability of the parent company.
In addition to this finding regarding corporate responsibility, the court convicted four senior executives individually, ensuring that personal accountability works in tandem with corporate responsibility. The prison sentences, ranging from three to six years, carry a deterrent effect that a fine imposed on the legal entity alone cannot match.
The court also convicted Firas Tlass and two local security directors as local intermediaries and facilitators, and dealt with the payment network as a system designed and authorized at the headquarters level, but implemented through a series of local actors. The verdict against them raises a question that it did not fully resolve, regarding the disparity between the sentences issued against them and those issued against the executive officials who created this system, and the extent to which it is permissible to hold local actors working within an institutional structure that they did not design responsible in the same way as those who created it. The size of the funding itself confirms the institutional nature of the crime. The value of 5.5 million euros over two years distinguishes this case from previous terrorism financing cases in France, not only in terms of quantity, but also in terms of nature, as the payments constituted an institutionally managed program. Applying Article 421-2-2 of the French Penal Code to institutional conduct of this depth is an unprecedented precedent.
The court’s handling of the former employees is the most prominent shortcoming of the ruling. Under French law, the status of a civil party in criminal proceedings does not allow plaintiffs to obtain compensation unless the harm they suffered falls within the legally recognized category of the crime attributed to them. The court held that the individuals could not be considered victims of terrorism financing according to the legal definition of this crime, which led to the severing of the causal link between Lafarge’s payments to the Islamic State and the working conditions these employees endured, from checkpoints run by armed groups, kidnappings, sniper fire, and a constant threat of retaliation, facts described by the employees in testimonies whose credibility was acknowledged by the court itself.
This result reflects a flaw: criminal proceedings and the compensation mechanism follow two different legal paths. A judgment that establishes the company’s guilt does not automatically lead to direct compensation for those affected. The French duty of vigilance law theoretically provides a civil avenue for employees affected by the overseas operations of French multinational companies. However, no successful application of this law has yet been recorded in extraterritorial conflict contexts, and its scope in conflict environments remains untested. Thus, former employees leave these proceedings without compensation and without a clear local avenue to obtain it.
Civil society organizations play a key role in bridging this gap. Sherpa and the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights initiated the original complaint in 2016 and have continued their advocacy and legal follow-up efforts for a full decade, providing support to staff at all stages of litigation. Their role does not end with the issuance of the judgment. If criminal proceedings fail to deliver justice to the victims, civil society organizations can pursue parallel civil claims, document the harm for use in alternative proceedings, and lobby for legislative reform of the civil claims framework. The flaw revealed by the Lafarge ruling, which excluded the most directly affected individuals from remedies due to the legal definition of the alleged crime, is precisely the kind of gap that requires organized legal advocacy to address it, whether through local civil litigation or by lobbying the legislature to reform existing provisions.
The most important aspect of the Lafarge case remains unresolved. The judicial investigation into the company’s involvement in crimes against humanity has continued for nearly eight years without the case being referred to trial. This delay reflects a range of factors, including the complexity of the evidence needed to prove a link between specific payments from the company and specific crimes committed by the Islamic State against Syrian civilians, the limited resources of the investigating judiciary in the face of an accused with abundant resources, and the institutional caution against bringing charges without a well-established precedent in French law.
However, the conviction for financing terrorism changes this equation, as it proves judicially that Lafarge knowingly financed the Islamic State during the period in which crimes were committed against Syrian civilians and the Yazidi community. This constitutes a relevant factual basis, but it removes the central jurisprudential obstacle. French courts have traditionally required a more direct facilitating link than the standard provided for in the Rome Statute under Article 25(3)(c), which is sufficient that the accused provided assistance knowing that it would contribute to the commission of the crime, without requiring that he intended the specific result. It remains uncertain whether French courts will interpret the concept of complicity in a way that approaches this standard. It is also necessary to distinguish between the elements of knowledge in the two crimes. The charge of financing terrorism required proof that Lafarge knew that the funds would be used by a terrorist organization, while complicity in crimes against humanity requires a connection to facilitating specific criminal conduct. The two criteria are overlapping, but not identical, and considering the conviction in the case of financing terrorism as a final resolution of the question of knowledge in the charge of crimes against humanity would magnify its real impact.
What this ruling provides, alongside the French proceedings, is a set of documented factual findings regarding the payment network, the circumstances faced by employees, and the corporate decision-making process that led to both—findings that carry evidentiary weight before other accountability mechanisms. International bodies investigating corporate conduct in Syria, and third-country jurisdictions exercising universal jurisdiction, can rely on these findings without having to re-examine the underlying facts. This link between domestic criminal proceedings and international accountability mechanisms is particularly important because investigations into crimes against humanity can take years to reach a conclusion, if they ever do reach the trial stage.
Ten years passed between the filing of the original complaint and the issuance of the conviction for financing terrorism. During these years, the former Syrian employees who initiated these proceedings participated, testified before the courts, waited a full decade for judicial investigation, and then left the court without compensation. All they received was a court ruling proving that the company that employed them knowingly financed the armed groups that threatened them. This is a very important ruling from a legal standpoint, and it will not lose its value, but it does not achieve justice.
