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The Duty of Care of the Parent Company: A Comparison between French Law, UK Precedents and the Swiss Proposals

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 July 2019

Dalia PALOMBO
Dalia PALOMBO*
Affiliation:
LSE Fellow, London School of Economics and Political Science-Law, Senior Research Fellow, Institute for Business Ethics, University of St. Gallen, Swizerland.
*
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Abstract

In 2017, France established a due diligence statutory obligation for French parent companies to monitor extraterritorial human rights and environmental abuses committed by their off-shore affiliates. Switzerland is also considering adopting a similar law for Swiss parent companies. These obligations are comparable to the duty of care that, according to recent case law, British parent companies owe towards their subsidiaries’ neighbours. This article compares and contrasts the newly introduced French due diligence statutory obligation, the UK precedents, and two alternative Swiss legislative proposals on the due diligence and duty of care of parent companies.

Keywords

duty of caredue diligence obligationhuman rightsmultinational enterprisesFranceSwitzerlandUK
Type
Scholarly Articles
Information
Business and Human Rights Journal , Volume 4 , Issue 2 , July 2019 , pp. 265 - 286
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2019 

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Footnotes

Note that part of this article is also reproduced in the forthcoming book Dalia Palombo, Business and Human Rights The Obligations of the European Home States (Hart Publishing, 2019). I would like to thank Professor David Kershaw, Professor Florian Wettstein and Mr. Daniel Leader for their extremely useful comments on various versions of this article. I also would like to thank Professor Anita Ramasastry and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions. However, please note that the views of the author are her own.

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78 David Newton Sealey v ArmorGroup Services Ltd, note 46; Caparo v Dickman, note 38; Petrin, note 44; Bullimore, note 44.

79 Thompson v the Renwick Group plc, note 32; Chandler v Cape plc, note 31.

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83 Xavier, note 56; Drouin, note 52; Pierre-Louis, note 54; Brabant and Savourey, note 56; Vedanta v Lungowe [2019], note 28 paras 6-14 and 42-62.

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85 Vedanta v Lungowe [2019], note 28.

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