Raphaelle Jouen, BHR Legal Advisor at GRC
When the Tribunal correctionnel de Paris handed down its judgment on 13 April 2026, convicting Lafarge SA and eight of its executives for financing terrorism, the ruling landed with somewhat of a global corporate warning bell. The company – and the other defendants – has appealed, but the signal is already unmistakable: operating in conflict‑affected and high‑risk areas (CAHRAs) is no longer a matter of improvisation, instinct, or “business continuity at all costs”. It is a legal, operational, and ethical minefield in which the absence of proper diligence can expose a company to criminal prosecution and reputational collapse.
The story is by now well known. Lafarge SA launched its Syrian subsidiary, Lafarge Cement Syria (LCS), in 2010, presenting the Jalabiya plant as a strategic foothold in a promising market. Within a year, Syria had descended into armed conflict. By 2012–2013, northern Syria had become a patchwork of armed factions, checkpoints, and shifting front lines. Yet Lafarge SA and LCS pressed on, determined to keep the plant open even as the surrounding territory fell under the control of armed groups such as Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), Jabhat al‑Nusra, and Ahrar al‑Sham. By 2016, journalists revealed that LCS had paid these groups to secure access, protection, and passage, which led human rights organisations and former employees to file a criminal complaint in France. In the United States, Lafarge pleaded guilty in 2022 to providing material support to U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organisations ISIS and Jabhat al Nusra, paying $778 million and agreeing not to contradict the admitted facts. This admission reshaped the French defence strategy: unable to deny the payments, Lafarge pivoted to the impoverished argument that the support did not meet the legal definition of financing terrorism under French law.
Leaving aside the twists and turns of this case, and the potential for a follow-on case involving allegations of complicity in crimes against humanity based on the same facts, what emerges from the judgment and the trial record is not simply a story of criminal exposure, but a stark illustration of what happens when a company fails to conduct appropriate human rights due diligence.
First, Lafarge SA and LCS should have recognised, almost immediately, that they were operating in a CAHRA. The conflict was widely reported, and the fact that LCS’s own director had to leave Syria and operate from neighbouring Egypt underscores how evident the deterioration of the security situation had become. The (express and implied) claim that senior Lafarge SA and LCS executives were not aware of the proximate nature and scope of the internal armed conflict affecting Syria was never a persuasive argument, let alone the basis for respecting human rights or protecting the company’s reputation. This obvious determination should have led them to conclude that their best interests lay not only in conducting human rights due diligence, but heightened human rights due diligence (hHRDD) – heightened “because the risk of gross human rights abuses is heightened in conflict-affected areas” (UNGPs, Guiding Principle 7). At a minimum this requires companies “to identify and assess not only the adverse human rights impacts they may cause or contribute to, or that may be directly linked to their operations, products or services, but also actual or potential adverse impacts on the conflict that the enterprise may cause or contribute to through its own activities, or that may be directly linked to its operations, products or services” (see UNDP, p.23).
Had Lafarge SA and LCS conducted hHRDD, they would have begun by mapping the conflict and its actors (see UNDP, p.23). According to basic BHR standards, relevant sources of information would include independent human rights reporting, media coverage, and social media monitoring (see UNGPs, Guiding Principle 18; and UNDP, p.25). Those available at the time would have readily shown that ISIS and Jabhat al‑Nusra were Al‑Qaida affiliates (subject to Security Council sanctions since 2002), and that Ahrar al‑Sham was operating alongside them to commit grave abuses against civilians. Indeed, even a disinterested party in a hurry could have discovered these facts. Equally, the conflict analysis required by hHRDD would have shown that these groups were not labelled as generic “rebels” (as curiously asserted by the defendants) but organised Islamist armed groups with hierarchical structures, ideological agendas, and documented patterns of atrocities (see UN Human Rights Committee A/HRC/22/CPR.1, para.22, A/HRC/27/60, paras. 32–45 and 58–65, and A/HRC/28/69, paras. 20–30; see also Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and media and social media coverage). Indeed, any suggestion that they were anything but seems, even without the benefit of hindsight, to be a suggestion too far.
The defendant companies would also have understood that stakeholder engagement in a conflict zone is a necessary but challenging endeavour and that, whilst BHR standards permit, and indeed in some situations even encourage, companies to meet armed actors to understand relevant risks, they prohibit entering into any formal or de facto contractual arrangements with groups committing atrocities (see UNDP, p.43). Yet LCS ignored these prohibitions and instead negotiated and transacted in exchange for sizeable payments, security, checkpoint arrangements, and access guarantees – precisely the type of formal engagement that is difficult, if not impossible, to justify under BHR’s stakeholder engagement standards.
Heightened HRDD would have further required Lafarge SA and LCS to assess the extent to which their business activities might be involved in actual and/or potential adverse impacts on human rights and on the dynamics of the conflict in Syria (see UNGPs, Guiding Principles 13 and 23, commentary; and UNDP, pp.23 and 31). Understanding the risks of these activities causing, contributing to, or being linked to adverse impacts on human rights and the conflict was critical and could have been readily uncovered through a steady application of hHRDD. By applying the threshold tests provided for in BHR guidelines (see UNDP, p.27), the companies would have been able to assess that their activities were highly likely to contribute to the systemic violations being committed by the three terrorist groups – ISIS, Jabhat al‑Nusra, and Ahrar al‑Sham – or, at the very least, linked to them. Putting aside the ethical issues, any assessed contribution should have raised alarm bells concerning complicity and potential criminal liability, whether in France (for ‘financing terrorism’) or elsewhere, for violations of international humanitarian law or the commission of crimes against humanity (see UNGPs, Guiding Principle 17, commentary). But the advantages of conducting hHRDD would not have stopped there. Far from simply pointing out potential areas of responsibility, hHRDD would have also helped Lafarge SA and LCS to take reasonable business decisions, including mitigation or, as a last resort, responsible disengagement from Syria (see UNGPs, Guiding Principle 19, commentary; OECD Guidelines, commentary on Chapter II, paras.21-22). Far from shielding them from litigation and reputational risk, Lafarge SA’s and LCS’s lack of curiosity drove them inexorably into them.
For companies, this is the heart of the lesson. Heightened HRDD is not a soft‑law aspiration or a box‑ticking exercise. It is a practical, operational tool designed to help businesses identify relevant conflict dynamics, and risks and harm they cause, contribute or are linked to (and by extension their own legal and reputational risks), and make defensible decisions in challenging situations. Had Lafarge SA and LCS applied it, the companies would have recognised that the LCS cement plant stood in a CAHRA, understood the nature of the armed groups they were engaging with, avoided entering into prohibited relationships with them, and likely suspended operations before crossing criminal lines. Even if mistakes had been made, a documented, genuine attempt to follow BHR standards would have provided a more credible defence and given prosecutors pause for thought before pursuing criminal charges.
The Lafarge case is another illustration that ignorance is no defence, that intermediaries do not shield a company from liability, and that “buffer” arrangements – like the use of a local facilitator to negotiate with armed groups – do not break the chain of causation or responsibility. Parent companies cannot outsource risks to local partners and subsidiaries, and the responsibility to understand the context, assess the risks, and act on those findings may sit squarely with the parent company as well as its subsidiaries.
For businesses operating in or near instability – whether in extractives, construction, logistics, agribusiness, tech, or finance – the message is clear: conflict can escalate quickly, and the line between operational necessity and legal exposure can blur in an instant. If in doubt, companies would be well advised to presume they are in a CAHRA, build hHRDD into their operations as a matter of necessity, and be prepared to pause or exit when the risks are shown to be unmanageable. Responsible disengagement is not a failure; it is a safeguard.