The Verdict That Echoed Across Continents
In a Manhattan courtroom this week, a jury of eight people rendered a decision that sounded less like a ledger entry and more like a thunderclap: France’s banking giant BNP Paribas was found to have aided genocide in Sudan by providing financial services that, according to the jury, violated U.S. sanctions.
The award—more than $20 million to three survivors who fled Sudan and now live in the United States—was not just a number. It was a judgment steeped in stories of fire, smoke, and loss. It was testimony from two men and one woman who recounted being tortured, burned with cigarettes, cut with knives and, in the woman’s case, sexually assaulted.
Faces Behind the Ruling
The plaintiffs did not stand as abstractions. They arrived in court carrying the language of survival: memories of villages emptied by Janjaweed militias, of fields left fallow, of family photos singed and gone. “I watched my brother fall,” one plaintiff said, her voice tight with memory. “We hid under a tree while the trucks came. Money bought those trucks.”
Their attorney, Bobby DiCello, told reporters afterward that the verdict represented more than personal compensation. “This is a victory for justice and accountability,” he said. “The jury recognized that financial institutions cannot turn a blind eye to the consequences of their actions. Our clients lost everything to a campaign of destruction fueled by U.S. dollars that BNP Paribas facilitated and that should have been stopped.”
A spokesperson for BNP Paribas responded with a statement passed to AFP: “This ruling is clearly wrong and there are very strong grounds to appeal the verdict, which is based on a distortion of controlling Swiss law and ignores important evidence the bank was not permitted to introduce.” The bank’s lawyers have already signaled they will take the case to higher courts.
How a Bank Becomes Part of a War
To understand how a bank ended up in a genocide trial, you need to read the ledger as part of a landscape of commerce. BNP Paribas, one of Europe’s largest banks, operated in Sudan from the late 1990s until 2009, providing letters of credit that allowed Khartoum to honor its import and export commitments.
These financial guarantees—paper assurances that a seller will get paid—are the plumbing of global trade. In this case they helped Sudan keep cotton, oil and other commodities moving to overseas buyers. The plaintiffs and their lawyers argued those transactions funneled billions into a government campaign that targeted specific ethnic communities in Darfur and elsewhere.
“A letter of credit looks innocuous,” said Professor Mira Al-Najjar, an international finance expert at a New York law school. “But when those letters keep government coffers filled, they can sustain militarised repression. Banking isn’t neutral when it props up machinery of violence.”
Numbers That Matter
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Jury size: 8 members.
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Award: Over $20 million to three plaintiffs.
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BNP Paribas’ Sudan activity: late 1990s to 2009, according to court filings.
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Darfur conflict estimates: The war beginning in 2003 has been linked to hundreds of thousands of deaths and the displacement of millions—figures that international bodies and humanitarian groups have long debated but agree are devastating in scale.
Voices from the Diaspora
In Brooklyn and Minneapolis, in London and Khartoum, the verdict punctured a quiet that many refugees had carried for years. Layla Hassan, who fled Darfur in 2005 and now runs a community center in Queens, said the ruling felt like recognition: “For so long, our pain was only whispered. Today, people with power—people with numbers and papers—had to hear those whispers and say, ‘You are not invisible.’”
Another survivor, speaking outside the courthouse, was more wary. “Money cannot bring back children,” he said. “But it can remind the world of what it did not stop.”
What This Case Signals Globally
The trial sits at the intersection of three larger currents sweeping the global order: the increasing willingness of courts to hold corporations accountable for human-rights harms, the complexities of sanctions enforcement, and the opaque role of finance in modern conflict.
Legal scholars say this case could widen the aperture through which we view corporate responsibility. “We’re witnessing a shift,” said Daniel Koehler, a human-rights lawyer who has worked on corporate accountability cases in Europe. “Companies can no longer hide behind jurisdictional boundaries and banking formalities when their services materially advance mass atrocities.”
At the same time, governments have leaned more heavily on economic tools—sanctions, asset freezes, trade restrictions—as instruments of foreign policy. Those tools rely on banks to execute or block transactions, making financial institutions both instruments of and potential bulwarks against state violence.
Questions for the Reader
When should a bank say no? How much diligence is enough to prevent a letter of credit from becoming a pipeline to terror? And what is the moral accounting when profits meet power?
Ask yourself: Do we assume the financial world is detached from the blood and soil of conflict zones? Or is it time to acknowledge that wire transfers and letters of credit can be as consequential as bullets?
Local Color and Human Cost
Darfur’s savannahs, once patterned with millet fields and nomadic herds, have the quiet of places emptied too quickly. Stories from survivors are specific and granular: the taste of smoke in a child’s hair, the rusted roar of militia trucks, the sudden absence of a neighbor who used to repair broken hoes. Cotton fields that fed families became commodities on foreign ships’ manifests.
“My father used to sing to the cotton,” one plaintiff recalled. “We sold the cotton to pay for weddings, for medicine. Then the same cotton bought guns.”
What Comes Next
BNP Paribas has vowed to appeal. The bank’s legal team will argue procedural errors and point to legal complexities—Swiss law, international banking norms, and the tangled web of contracts that move across borders.
For the survivors, appeals will mean more waiting. But even if the award is overturned, the verdict has a life beyond the courtroom: it sets a precedent in public conscience. There is a rhythm to accountability that runs far beyond legal briefs—press releases, board meetings, reputational risk and, sometimes, policy reform.
“No verdict undoes our lives,” one plaintiff said softly. “But it opens a door. Maybe another family will not have to sit where we sat.”
Final Reflections
We live in an era where capital moves at the speed of light, but consequences lag. The BNP Paribas verdict asks us to bridge that gap—to make moral sense of financial flows and to consider whether the systems we rely on for trade and credit should bear a clearer duty of care.
What responsibility should global banks accept when their services can tip the balance between civilian life and mass violence? How should societies balance the expediencies of commerce with the imperative to prevent harm?
Questions, not easy answers, are what courts and communities will wrestle with next. Whatever the legal outcome on appeal, this case has already rewritten the conversation: it placed at the center of American jurisprudence the idea that a bank’s pages of signatures and guarantees can, in some circumstances, be measured against the lives they help—or harm.
