France’s highest court dismissed an appeal Tuesday from Lafarge, a French building materials manufacturer, seeking to drop charges of complicity in crimes against humanity. In 2017, Sherpa, the European Centre for Constitutional and Human rights, as well as 11 former employees, filed a complaint alleging that Lafarge had financed terrorist groups, endangered the lives of its employees and was complicit in war crimes and crimes against humanity, leading to a criminal investigation into Lafarge’s operations during the Syrian civil war.

Between 2012 and 2015, the territory on which Lafarge’s cement plant was located in Syria was subject to fighting and occupation by various armed groups, including the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS). Lafarge allegedly paid millions of euros to armed groups in exchange for permission to keep the factory operational. According to a 2017 internal investigation, the payments were made to overcome “unprecedented challenges to the operations” of the Syrian cement plant. Whilst management of foreign nationality was evacuated to Egypt in 2012, Syrian employees were kept on the premises, exposing them to extortion and kidnappings by armed groups.

The Cour de cassation affirmed the charges of complicity in crimes against humanity against Lafarge, setting a legal precedent as the first company “in the world to ever face such a charge.”

The court also dropped the charges relating to endangering the lives of its employees in violation of Article 233-I of the Criminal Code. The court held that although Lafarge had a strong involvement in managing its Syrian subsidiary, that did not justify applying French labour law to Syrian workers. According to Article 8 (2) and (4) of the Rome I Regulation, the individual employment contract is generally governed by the law of the country where the employee performed their work, meaning that Syrian law would apply in this scenario. The court found that the influence by Lafarge over its Syrian subsidiary did not establish a closer connection to France than Syria for the Syrian employees.

Lafarge pled guilty in a New York federal court in 2022 to conspiring to provide material support to ISIS and ANF between 2013 and 2014. The company admitted to routing nearly six million dollars in illicit payments to these terrorist organisations. This allowed the company to continue operating its cement plant and obtain 70.3 million dollars in revenue.

Lafarge still faces charges of complicity in crimes against humanity, financing a terrorist organisation and violating an embargo with Syria.