Holding Companies Liable for Human Rights Abuses Related to Foreign Subsidiaries and Suppliers before German Civil Courts

With economic globalization, multinational companies based in Europe increasingly operate in countries unable or unwilling to protect the rights of their citizens. While their operations can have positive impacts on the local human rights situation, for example, by creating tax revenue and employment, there is a high number of cases in which foreign subsidiaries and suppliers of European companies have been accused of causing human rights abuses. In such cases, the victims often lack access to effective remedy in their home countries while the companies involved do not face any legal consequences. In particular, this applies to the European parent or buying companies, whose contribution to an abuse is rarely assessed by local courts, even where they may have influenced or effectively controlled the subsidiary’s or supplier’s conduct resulting in the human rights abuse. In response to this situation, human rights lawyers have increasingly engaged in transnational tort litigation to enforce the rights of the victims and obtain compensation. The main forum for such litigation has been the United States with its unique Alien Tort Statute (ATS), which allows non-US citizens to file tort-based claims against non-US companies for complicity in egregious overseas human rights violations before US courts. 1 Since the 1990s, more than 150 complaints have been filed against companies under this statute, many of them against companies domiciled in Europe. 2 Yet with the US Supreme Court’s decision in Kiobel , which narrows the extraterritorial application of the ATS to cases that ‘touch and concern the territory of the United States ... with sufficient force’, European jurisdictions will become more important as a venue for such complaints in the future. 3

Alien Tort Statute · Business · Human rights · Liability · Multinational corporation · Political science · Statute · Subsidiary · Tort · Corporate Law and Human Rights · Law

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