The report recommends that the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) should monitor and record the alleged basis of legal liability for each defendant in cases where multiple defendants are charged with the same principal offence.
The general basis for liability is the following: "Any act of a person that causes injury to another obligates the person through whose fault the injury occurred to give redress".
Confirming the 11 settlements, the Order's spokeswoman, a solicitor with the Catholic Church Insurance Association, stressed, "the claims were made purely on a commercial basis with no admission of liability".
"Vladimir Putin stands accused of this murder not on the basis of inference, vicarious liabilities or vagrancy but on solid and direct evidence – the best evidence that is ever likely to be available in relation to a secret and corrupt criminal enterprise in the Kremlin," he said.
Finally, the Agreement's Article 8 on Loss and Damage was necessary from the point of view of the most vulnerable countries, but the most contentious issue is settled in Decision 52, where the Parties agree that this "does not involve or provide a basis for any liability of compensation".
A spokesperson for the order, now called the Comboni Missionaries, said: "All the claims were made on a purely commercial basis and with no admission of liability".
In all these instances the use of the notion of cause is central to the legal inquiry, since to establish responsibility it must be shown that the harm was done or brought about by the agency that the law treats as a potential basis for the existence or extent of liability.
By contrast, the court has long accepted disparate impact as a basis for establishing liability under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the basic federal law prohibiting race and sex discrimination in employment.
"The trustee's unprecedented theory of liability has no legal basis," Mr. Levander said.
"In addition to that, there could be some potential criminal liability on the basis of possible contraventions of Canadian firearms regulations if they were to use actual firearms instead of airsoft which are, of course, not defined as firearms".
As it appears that the plane was mistaken for a military aircraft, the main basis for criminal liability would be recklessness or criminal negligence, argues Payam Akhavan, a professor of international law at McGill University in Montreal, Canada.
