Webinar on access to justice and business and human rights

Learn more about access to justice, effective remedies, and business and human rights attending a free webinar that expands on access to remedies report prepared by the European Law Institute with input from the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights.

The ELI Report, with input from the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA), recognizes that businesses, which can exert economic and social power comparable to that of sovereign states, may participate in actions that negatively impact human rights. Access to justice by victims of such violations can often be hindered in practice by a number of factors, including the inherent imbalance of power between victims of human rights abuse and large companies.

The report makes recommendations for how the EU, Member States, and non-Member States should work together to overcome the shared challenges that victims face. It recommends proper legal procedural principles, as well as judicial collective redress procedures and effective non-judicial mechanisms. It emphasizes the necessity of information access and looks at how those issues are implemented in the setting of private international law jurisdictional norms and applicable law regimes. The report also demonstrates how the relationship between human rights due diligence and remedies should be strengthened. Significantly, the ELI team proposes an effective technique to establish communal restitution mechanisms.  It calls for the creation of an EU Ombuds institution, that would serve as an alternative dispute resolution mechanism having relevant expertise, capable of both standard-setting and complaint-handling while avoiding issues of private international law.

The full report and further information on the project can be found here. On March 29, 2022, from 18:15–19:45 CET, a free webinar on the subject will be held for the general public. Please click here to sign up.

Source: European Law Institute