📝Tensions et contradictions entre les instruments relatifs à la vigilance raisonnable des entreprises. D’un processus de vigilance à la consécration d’un standard de responsabilité, in 🕴️M.-A. Frison-Roche (dir.), 📕L’obligation de Compliance

► Full reference: L. Dubin, “Tensions et contradictions entre les instruments relatifs à la vigilance raisonnable des entreprises. D’un processus de vigilance à la consécration d’un standard de responsabilité” (Tensions and contradictions between the instruments relating to the reasonable due diligence of companies. From a due diligence process to the recognition of a standard of liability), in M.-A. Frison-Roche (ed.), L’Obligation de Compliance, Journal of Regulation & Compliance (JoRC) and Dalloz, “Régulations & Compliance” series, 2025, pp. 617-634.

____

📕read a general presentation of the book, L’Obligation de Compliance, in which this article is published

____

► Summary of the article (by the Journal of Regulation & Compliance – JoRC): The author focuses on the notion of “due diligence of multinational enterprises” as it emerges from texts of Public International Law, namely the UN and OECD Guiding Principles. She considers that one must start from this notion of “due diligence”, which imposes a conduct not only on States but also on companies that “take responsibility upon themselves”, a movement expressed through a “reasonable vigilance so as not to harm others”. There is therefore a standard of conduct, the one that forbids harming others, since there is a duty to take care of others, which “reveals itself” in concreto in the various legal orders. The author holds that it is the role of civil liability (and therefore of the judges) to carry out this revelation by attaching secondary obligations to it.

For the author, by this measure “compliance” is only a doxa that increases the domination of companies, and one should rather adopt the aforementioned perspective of Public International Law, which must be taken up directly by domestic laws, the European directive and the new case law developed by judges. The author is all the more hostile to Compliance and to its link with Vigilance in that it allows exemptions from a liability that should on the contrary be increased, since liability must be articulated with the accountability of the moral duty (duty of care) incumbent on multinational enterprises.

________

🦉This article is available in full text to those enrolled in Professor Marie-Anne Frison-Roche’s courses

________