Can Sovereign-Owned Enterprises Be Prosecuted in National Courts?

Sovereign-owned enterprises – corporate entities owned or controlled by a state – are an energetic and growing presence in the world economy. Their rise coincides with an entirely separate phenomenon, at least in some countries, of corporate criminal prosecutions – that is, efforts to obtain convictions of non-human actors under national criminal laws. The confluence of these two trends will inevitably lead to prosecutions of corporate entities where a national state may claim that the corporate defendant should be protected by the principle of sovereign immunity. A case now pending in the United States, including a recent decision of the Supreme Court of that country, offers an interesting insight into the many different components of this important problem.