Holding Companies Liable for Human Rights Abuses Related to Foreign Subsidiaries and Suppliers before German Civil Courts: Lessons fromJabir and Others v KiK

Putting the French Duty of Vigilance Law in Context: Towards Corporate Accountability for Human Rights Violations in the Global South?

“…Several of these cases involved indigenous communities taking action against corporations like Texaco-Chevron (Ecuador), Shell (Nigeria), or Rio Tinto (Papua New Guinea) (Gilbert 2012). However, in the recent past, it has become more difficult to file complaints concerning TNC's extraterritorial duties on human rights in the USA, while European jurisdictions have become more important as a venue for such complaints (see Wesche and Saage-Maaß 2016).…”

“…However, Bradshaw (2020: 146) warns that this case might actually lead companies to be more cautious with the voluntary disclosure of information in the future and he argues that "the battle for these particular claimants may have been won, but the war concerning jurisdiction over parent companies and their foreign subsidiaries is not over." More broadly speaking, literature on tort action cases on alleged human rights violations of TNCs abroad has comprehensively discussed existing procedural and practical challenges, such as the admission of cases in the courts of home state countries and the high costs that often arise in such transnational cases (Gilbert 2012;Wesche and Saage-Maaß 2016). Furthermore, given the structural asymmetry in information, claimants from countries in the Global South, often belonging to marginalized groups, have encountered great difficulties in proving their cases (Terwindt et al 2018;Enneking 2019).…”

Labour Standards in Global Production Networks: Assessing Transnational Private Regulation and Workers’ Capacity to Act

“…These include conflicting costs, resources and incentives across global production networks, in which lead firms may have less room for manoeuvre than we imagine between reducing costs or rewarding compliance (Amengual et al., 2020; Grabs, 2020). Be that as it may, workers’ capacity to act is also tied to state actions in the jurisdictions of both suppliers and lead firms (Amengual and Chirot, 2016; Bartley, 2018; Cashore et al., 2021; Fransen and Burgoon, 2017; Graz et al., 2020; LeBaron, 2020; Wesche and Saage‐Maaß, 2016). As noted, recent studies on the Bangladesh Accord suggest that the more binding the design, the more promising the results — albeit limited regarding process rights (Bair et al., 2020; Schuessler et al., 2019).…”

Shared Responsibility and Labor Rights in Global Supply Chains

“…Specifically, victims may bring action in France even if the harm occurred in a territory outside France. 11 Another relevant legal development occurred in Germany in the court case of Jabir and Others v. KiK (Wesche & Saage-Maaß, 2016), in which the regional court of Dortmund set an international precedent by accepting jurisdiction in a case from a textile factory in Karachi, Pakistan, and granting legal aid to four of its workers who filed a compensation claim against the German clothing retailer KiK. The Dortmund court was the first in the history of sweatshops to consider the legal responsibility of a Western-based brand for the violation of labor standards in a production factory abroad while recognizing no direct employer-employee relationship between the two parties.…”