And here we have it! 📢
EU member states approved today the adoption of the EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive. See here. 🚨
Large companies that are active in the EU market will need to conduct sustainability due diligence (which includes environmental and human rights due diligence) across (most of) their value chains. The final step is the adoption vote by the European Parliament.
We’ll be putting our legal hats back on to convey how we think lawyers will start to interpret the text as part of an upcoming video and briefing. Stay tuned for that, but in the meantime, let’s remind all lawyers that the basis of the EU CSDDD remains the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, so they would be well advised to build their understanding of the business and human rights instruments that ground the law in order to better meet its expectations. 🌟
Shifting gears to business and human rights in practice on the ground, it’s always a very strange feeling when you come back from a human rights impact assessment.
You feel that you’ve left somehow a part of you back there - with the workers, the people you’ve met. You’ve heard so much, and people from different walks of life have opened up to you about their work, their lives, their needs, their desires, and their hopes. We see that we are all connected as humans - and these basic needs are shared across the globe. We see that every time what we hear translates into a desire for human rights (including ILO standards) to be respected and protected. 🧑🏽🚀
We now, as human rights impact assessors, carry a responsibility toward the workers for the salient human rights impacts we’ve heard, and for finding meaningful ways to tackle them. Yet, so many of these salient impacts are endemic and sector-wide. Bring together a mass illiterate work force, a rapidly growing industry and lax labour protections and you have a recipe for disaster.
The good news with the HRIA that we’ve just run with Maddie in India is that we have a powerful model to work with. A key buyer brought along a key supplier, who in turn brought along a number of sub-suppliers dotted around West India. A number of companies across one value chain see the value of better understanding where the human rights impacts are and what they are. This in turn sets the scene for meaningful discussions on what can be done - both vertically, across sub-suppliers, and horizontally, with buyers and suppliers involved in partnership. 🙌
We’re still unpacking so we don’t know yet where this one will lead us, but we do know that this model of partnership-based HRIAs will need to increase if we have any chances of tackling the endemic issues that exist in global supply chains. 🤝
Let’s be honest about what it takes, and tackle it head on. We owe it to the many vulnerable workers who are working day in and day out in global supply chains to do better at HRIA implementation. Challenge accepted? Will you commit to use the EU CSDDD (assuming it passes the Parliament vote) to take meaningful action? 🫵
And to lighten the road ahead, let me share some inspiration and photos from our day off in Mumbai in between the two weeks where we went to the Gandhi museum (Mani Bhavan) depicting Gandhi’s life and work. Isn’t it interesting how most things bring us back to business and human rights? Gandhi’s first ‘Satyagraha’ (truth and non-violence) movement was in the Champaran district of Bihar, fighting for justice for the workers forced to cultivate indigo by the British for hardly any money. And this paved the way for an Indian National Movement, which paved the way for India’s independence from the British Empire in 1947.🇮🇳
History in the making is made one day at a time. Will today (15 March 2024) be viewed as a historic day for business and human rights?
We certainly hope so. 🤞
Anna
