{"id":79653,"date":"2017-01-02T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2017-01-01T23:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/foraus.ch\/blog-post\/konzernverantwortungsinitiative-a-skilful-foreign-policy-measure\/"},"modified":"2026-05-27T11:20:36","modified_gmt":"2026-05-27T09:20:36","slug":"konzernverantwortungsinitiative-a-skilful-foreign-policy-measure","status":"publish","type":"blog-post","link":"https:\/\/foraus.ch\/fr\/blog-post\/konzernverantwortungsinitiative-a-skilful-foreign-policy-measure\/","title":{"rendered":"Konzernverantwortungsinitiative: a skilful foreign-policy measure"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\n\nCorporations headquartered in Switzerland should undertake appropriate due diligence procedures and be held accountable in front of Swiss courts.<\/b>\n\n<\/div>\n\n
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\n\nSwiss based corporations have the capacity to positively or adversely affect human rights of individuals, families or communities in foreign countries. The\u00a0Corporate Justice Initiative<\/a>(Konzerverantwortungsinitiative, KOVI) seeks to bring justice to this constellation of global production. The idea: Corporations headquartered in Switzerland should undertake appropriate due diligence procedures and be held accountable in front of Swiss courts. This is neither radical nor redundant, but a skilful foreign-policy measure that represents a logical complement to already existing corporate self-commitments and follows the broader legal trends within a typical European home state of multinational corporations.\n\nThe Corporate Justice Initiative in addition to Corporate Social Responsibilities<\/i>\n\nThe KOVI seeks to regulate, with binding effect, what large Swiss based corporations claim to have been doing all along: Respecting human rights and assuming responsibility for people directly affected by their operations. One starts to wonder why, then, corporate representatives are not celebrating the codification of their best efforts. A legal requirement to carry out due diligence does neither seek to nor is capable of replacing corporate engagements in the form of education, health, or community development programs. It rather provides a procedural structure for those endeavours. Further, the KOVI does not interfere with the playground of competitive advantage through corporate social responsibility rankings, but rather defines a minimum bar for a new level playing field. This would signal that Switzerland takes its own constitutional commitments to \u201cpromote respect for human rights\u201d in foreign relations and \u201cthroughout the legal system\u201d seriously.\n\nThe Corporate Justice Initiative follows the trend in Europe and elsewhere<\/i>\n\nThe pure term \u201cmultinational\u201d calls for a look beyond Switzerland\u2019s borders. Firstly, the initiative\u2019s idea that a parent company owns a duty of care towards people affected by the conduct of a foreign subsidiary has been extensively discussed outside of our national context. For example, an employee of a South-African subsidiary of the UK-based company\u00a0Cape PLC<\/i>\u00a0sued\u00a0<\/a>the corporation for the exposure to dust and the subsequent contraction of asbestosis. The Court of Appeal in London applied a liability test, which resembles the core idea of the KOVI: It asked if the harm was foreseeable, if there was a relationship of proximity, and if it was reasonable to impose a duty of care. Further, recently on 29th<\/sup>November 2016, French members of the National Assembly adopted an ambitious\u00a0draft law<\/a>\u00a0on the duty of vigilance for parent and subcontracting companies.\n\nSecondly, the question of (legitimate) jurisdiction has also been debated elsewhere. In 2005, the European Court of Justice\u00a0\u00a0clarified<\/a>\u00a0that courts could not easily dismiss preceedings based on\u00a0forum non conveniens,\u00a0<\/i>an abstention doctrine that seeks to ascertain whether there would be a more appropriate forum for the claims brought forward. Additionally, in October 2016, a Canadian court agreed to hear a tort\u00a0\u00a0claim<\/a>\u00a0against the Vancouver-based\u00a0Nevsun<\/i>\u00a0for alleged human rights abuses in an Eritrean mine. Moreover, on 28th<\/sup>\u00a0November, a US district court, in the decade long litigation against\u00a0Chiquita\u00a0<\/i>for funding Colombian death squads, rejected the corporation\u2019s\u00a0\u00a0argument\u00a0<\/a>\u00a0that the case should be heard in Colombia rather than in the United States.\n\nIf Switzerland is not keen on substituting the \u201ctax haven\u201d label with a \u201ccorporate impunity\u201d stamp, it should keep up with the broader development in Europe, the US and Canada. The KOVI represents a first step in the right direction.\n\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":68606,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false},"archive-status":[],"region":[],"custom-themes":[1953],"class_list":["post-79653","blog-post","type-blog-post","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","custom-themes-internationale-zusammenarbeit-entwicklung"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/foraus.ch\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/blog-post\/79653","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/foraus.ch\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/blog-post"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/foraus.ch\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/blog-post"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foraus.ch\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/68606"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/foraus.ch\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=79653"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"archive-status","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foraus.ch\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/archive-status?post=79653"},{"taxonomy":"region","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foraus.ch\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/region?post=79653"},{"taxonomy":"custom-themes","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foraus.ch\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/custom-themes?post=79653"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}