The European Parliament adopts on Wednesday March 10, 2021 a draft initiative on the duty of vigilance and corporate responsibility in theEuropean Union (EU). MEPs want to put pressure on the Commission so that it urgently presents legislation ensuring that companies are held responsible when they infringe (or contribute to undermine) human rights or the environment, even when it is their subsidiary which is implicated locally.
This text arouses strong opposition from European employers, but the principle is consensus in all political groups. As the devil is often in the details of the text, West France to better understand the issues, interviewed Chloé Stevenson, campaign manager for ActionAid France, an NGO that works with other associations and unions (Amnesty International, Amis de la Terre France, Ethics on the label, CCFD, CFDT , CGT, LDH, Sherpa) in favor of the adoption of the most extensive legislation possible in this area.
What does a duty of vigilance consist of for companies?
The idea is to force companies to respect human rights and the environment throughout their value chain. When we say throughout their value chain, concretely, it is not only the company itself, but also its subsidiaries, its subcontractors and other companies with which it is linked and that it can control. The idea is to have real civil liability at EU level, which would be a big step forward.
Why do we need a European framework in this area?
Many organizations have long campaigned for this duty of vigilance, especially in southern countries, and have documented numerous human rights violations and serious environmental damage linked to the activity of large companies. However, Europe is home to a certain number of multinationals which, in the world, are either guilty or complicit in this kind of abuse. In textiles, we had the known example of Rana Plaza, but it can also be child labor in the cocoa sector.
To caricature, if a spread company destroys the forest in Indonesia to produce palm oil, local associations will be able to turn against it and not only against subcontractors paid locally …
It’s exactly that. It is extremely difficult to begin this process of seeking justice at the local level. Human rights defenders have a lot of obstacles and a lot of discrimination, even extreme violence against them.
It exists a law in France imposing such a duty of vigilance since 2017. But several NGOs criticize the excessively lax criteria which means that, in the end, there are no more than 150 companies concerned. Will it be different with this European text?
There are a lot of things that can be improved with the European directive, now that we can see what the flaws in French law are, after several years of existence. French law excludes a large number of companies from this duty of vigilance, due to a threshold linked to a large number of employees, while these companies, which operate all over the world, are linked to a lot of abuse and ‘damage to the environment. We could, for example, drop this threshold for the number of employees.
Another problem with French law is that we do not know precisely which companies are concerned. Public authorities do not provide this information. This is something that needs to be improved with future regulation at European level.
What do you think is the main pitfall to avoid?
We absolutely want to avoid the kinds of lists to fill in to escape any responsibility for a company. The “I created an alert mechanism, I made such and such a diagnosis and it is good, I am quiet”. This approach is carried at European level by many companies. For us, the important thing is that it is a question of behavior and effective measurement, that companies change their way of doing things in a concrete way and adapted to the contexts in which they operate. It is therefore necessary to go further in the value chain than the first direct link between the European company and the local company.
Another challenge is to reverse the burden of proof to force companies to show that they are responsible, so that it is not up to the victims to have to prove it. Finally, there is a great need to strengthen the consideration of gender, which, if not mentioned, will go by the wayside. But human rights are also women’s rights.
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