A Long Way From Home

About A Long Way From Home...

Human Rights violations and environmental harms caused by exploitative production conditions are well documented, ongoing problems in transnational supply chains. As international soft law initiatives proved insufficient to stop such harms, some European countries established national Supply Chain Acts with specific duties of care and risk management approaches as obligations of buyer corporations. This hard law approach has now been adopted by the EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) which entered into force in July 2024 and has to be transposed into national laws by the EU Member States until July 2026.

This talk will introduce the regulatory approaches of the German Supply Chain Due Diligence Act and the CSDDD – with a specific focus on how non-judicial grievance mechanisms could provide effective access to remedy for rights-holders in the global South.

The regulatory concept of corporate risk management as a learning system is contrasted with the current reality of corporate and political backlash strategies which undermine the effective implementation and enforcement of legal due diligence obligations.

The session will end with a discussion of the role of civil society and Business and Human Rights scholarship in influencing such dynamics for the benefit of rights-holders and the environment.

Speaker

Professor Ulla Glaesser, LL.M. (UC Berkeley), holds a full professorship for mediation, conflict management and procedural theory at the European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder)/Germany. She is the academic director of the Institute for Conflict Management and the postgraduate, interdisciplinary Master’s Program on Mediation at the European University.

Her academic work includes classical legal as well as interdisciplinary and empirical research. She is continuously involved in research projects in the fields of conflict management and Business, Human Rights and the Environment – namely the establishment of mediation and other Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) procedures in the German corporate sector, on court-annexed mediation and on the potential of non-judicial grievance mechanisms of multilateral development banks, international climate funds and in supply chain risk management systems.

As a practical mediator and facilitator, Ms Glaesser supports dispute resolution and decision making processes within and between organisations/corporations/public institutions. She is member of the German Mediators’ Association, the International Academy of Mediators (IAM) and the International Advisory Board of the African Mediation Association.

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