📍 Picture the scene.
🔥 On one side: company representatives arguing that businesses exist to generate profit 💰, are accountable to shareholders, and can demonstrate rights-respecting practices through their codes of conduct.
⚖️ On the other: civil society representatives arguing that companies wield significant power 🌍—sometimes more than States—and have real-world impacts on many people’s lives. Given this, shouldn’t they have the same human rights duties as governments?
The debate was intense. It felt as if no common ground could be found.
💡 Then, John Ruggie stepped in.
He observed that were was commonality here between the parties.
Really I thought? Looking from one to the other, quite literally on opposite sides of the room.
👉 “Everyone in this room agrees that companies have a role to play in human rights.”
👉 “The question isn’t whether businesses have responsibilities—it’s what those responsibilities should be. And that’s what we need to define together.”
Suddenly, the room shifted from confrontation to solution-focused discussion.
📍 That was in a conference room, nearly 20 years ago, at Harvard. I was a lawyer in my 20s, who had just convinced my firm’s managing partner to let me travel to Harvard for one of my pro bono clients - John Ruggie, then Special Representative of the UN Secretary General on Business and Human Rights, and his team.
We were still in the ‘UN Norms’ days, when a UN body had determined that companies should also be responsible, alongside States, for promoting and securing human rights (Text here)
As a result of John’s UN mandate, with input from hundreds of stakeholders over six years, a structured and pragmatic consensus emerged:
✅ States have the duty to protect human rights
✅ Companies have the responsibility to respect human rights
🔎 But defining that responsibility required careful balance to enable an international consensus to be forged:
❌ It couldn’t apply only to a company’s direct operations—otherwise, a business could have picture-perfect working conditions for their employees, while making their products in exploitative conditions
❌ It couldn’t be limited to where companies had influence—otherwise, some could reduce their influence to avoid responsibility. And what would happen to all the severe impacts happening that companies have little influence over?
🚀 The solution? A full value chain approach—balanced with clear, practical measures:
✔️ Prioritization: Companies can - and should - drop impacts that are not severe to people so that they can prioritise their resources. Impacts arising in Tier1 that are not severe don’t need action
✔️ Defined responsibility: Companies are not expected to stop or remediate harms in their value chain they did not contribute to
✔️ Leverage-based solutions: A recognition that in a number of situations, a company will lack influence over a situation and there are limits to what one company can do alone. They can consider: How can I increase leverage? Can I collaborate? Engage with governments? Support suppliers?
✔️ Responsible disengagement: A recognition that companies will sometimes need to decide whether to continue sourcing from a partner, with a structured framework to guide this process
📜 The outcome? The international consensus of what can be expected of companies in the field of human rights, captured in the 2011 UN Guiding Principles on Business & Human Rights.
Companies embraced the consensus because it provided much-needed clarity and structure, transforming endless, adversarial debates with stakeholders into productive, solutions-focused discussions. ✨
No company could completely avoid being connected to human rights impacts. 🌍 The world was complex, supply chains were vast, and risks were inevitable. But instead of getting stuck in polarized disputes ⚖️, the consensus enabled practical, structured engagement—where companies and stakeholders could work together to find reasonable, actionable solutions. ✅
🔄 This shift—from emotion-driven conflict to constructive dialogue—was a game changer. And it is this international consensus that is at the heart of the current text of the EU CSDDD.
🌍 If the EU CSDDD is reopened, here’s what will happen:
🔒 Legal harmonization will collapse – alignment between EU laws and other laws that are themselves grounded on the soft law consensus will be lost
📉 Investor and regulatory consistency will disappear – the growing uniformity between legal expectations and investor demands will unravel
⚖️ The playing field will be slanted – with responsible businesses penalised for having invested in due diligence to date
🤝 Stakeholder opposition will intensify – any newly negotiated political text will struggle to gain acceptance
⏳ Years of legal uncertainty – since no one today knows how long it will take for a newly negotiated text to be agreed upon
We like fragmentation, inconsistency and uncertainty, said no company I know.
But here’s the good news. ✨ It ain’t over until it’s over.
This Omnibus situation shows us that things still happen, at the very last minute, and even when we thought things were closed.
📢 For businesses, the message to President Ursula von der Leyen and Commissioner Dombrovskis is clear: reopening Level 1 of the EU CSDDD would introduce unnecessary risk and uncertainty for business. Clarifications and simplifications can happen at Level 2.
The work to define reasonable expectations of companies in the field of human rights took years to build.
🔄 So now, let’s advance. Not re-debate.
👇 Pic I took of John Ruggie in Europe, shortly after the consensus was endorsed, speaking at a CEO-backed town hall for a major global company—explaining the consensus and how it benefits businesses
