Beyond Compliance (Tempus) Forum on Business and…

Moderator:

• Robert McCorquodale, Member of the UN Working Group on Business and Human Rights

Speakers: 

• John Ferguson, Professor in Accounting, University of St Andrews
• Chloé Bailey, Senior Legal Adviser, European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights
• Anna Mäenpää, Head of Sustainability, Due Diligence and Stakeholder Engagement, SOK Sustainability
• Douglass Cassel, Counsel, King & Spalding

Brief Description of the Session: 
The European Commission's Omnibus simplification package, introduced less than a year after the adoption of the EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) in 2024, proposes significant reforms to "simplify" human rights due diligence requirements and do so for "competitive" reasons.  

This retreat from regulatory rigor exemplifies a broader trend: despite decades of application of international standards and development of enforceable legislation on human rights and environmental due diligence (HREDD), deregulation pressures are creating an environment where compliance expectations are being diluted. This dynamic creates a critical paradox: while existing mHREDD laws represent significant regulatory progress, systemic implementation challenges undermine their transformative potential and threaten to establish a regulatory benchmark that could lead emerging legislation to replicate these shortcomings.  

Against this backdrop, this panel will address implementation challenges that operate across two critical levels: failures in the remedy and enforcement architecture, and fundamental deficiencies in due diligence execution that undermine the system's preventive foundation. While rightsholders struggle to access meaningful justice through existing channels and navigate complex jurisdictional tensions around cross-border accountability, the quality and integrity of due diligence processes themselves - which should identify and prevent harm in the first place - are being compromised by outsourcing practices that prioritize competitive market pressures over rigorous risk assessment. 

The panel analyzes three interconnected dimensions and explores what enforcement mechanisms must embody to ensure meaningful and safe participation for rightsholders.