International Human Rights Law ♦ Note 64 Va. J. Int’l L. 609 (2024)

Tempered Vigilance: Realizing Effective Remedy for Rightsholders Under the French Duty of Vigilance Law

NICOLAS FRIEDLICH

Following the promulgation of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) in 2011, several countries began statutorily requiring their largest companies to report on human rights risk across their supply chains. However, beyond reporting risk, no country had stood up a mechanism to enforce and remediate human rights impacts on rightsholders until 2017. In 2017, French President Francois Hollande signed the Duty of Vigilance (Loi de Vigilance) into law, adding new civil liability provisions to the French Commercial Code and inaugurating the first hard law regime for mandatory human rights and environmental due diligence (mHREDD) worldwide. Despite its pioneering approach, the Vigilance Law has failed to provide adequate remedy to rightsholders, especially for rightsholders operating across the Global South for French multinational enterprises. By interrogating the statutory and operational features of the Vigilance Law regime over the last seven years, this Note will argue that the French model erects insurmountable barriers to rightsholders in accessing remedy through the French judicial system.