On March 27, 2017, France enacted a law that would permanently alter the landscape of corporate accountability. The Duty of Vigilance Law required large French companies to identify, prevent, and remedy human rights and environmental harms across their entire value chains — including subsidiaries, subcontractors, and suppliers. Ten years on, the law has proven its legal teeth. The harder question is whether the tools companies and civil society have been using to enforce it are actually producing the change it was designed to drive.
To mark this inflection point, Ksapa convened a cross-sector gathering on March 26, 2026, convening together companies, and civil society organizations to examine an uncomfortable question: is litigation truly the most effective instrument for addressing the issues the law was built to solve? And under what conditions might mediation offer a more relevant, faster, and ultimately more transformative path?
1. A Decade of Case Law: When Law Becomes Operational Reality
Ten years ago, the roughly 270 French companies now subject to the law often treated duty of vigilance compliance as little more than an additional reporting requirement. The vigilance plan was a document to publish, not a risk management tool. A decade of steadily developing jurisprudence has fundamentally shifted that perception.
The litigation trajectory tells the story clearly. Across the full decade, 13 civil lawsuits have been filed, covering issues ranging from TotalEnergies’ climate emissions to dismissals at a Turkish subsidiary of Yves Rocher, or MBDA missile components used in airstrikes in Gaza. Three cases have been dismissed on procedural grounds, two have resulted in substantive rulings against the defendant companies, and one landmark deliberation — the TotalEnergies climate case — is expected on June 25, 2026.
What has changed most profoundly is doctrine. The specialized Chamber 5-12 of the Paris Court of Appeal, established in March 2024 for emerging litigation, and the 34th Civil Chamber of the Paris Judicial Tribunal have laid down clear jurisprudential markers: risk mapping is judicially reviewable, alert mechanisms must be genuinely co-constructed with stakeholders, and French law applies even when harm occurs abroad. The March 12, 2026 ruling against Groupe Rocher — condemned for anti-union firings at its Turkish subsidiary — illustrates this with precision: the court applied French law as a mandatory rule, setting aside Turkish prescription law entirely.
This judicial momentum is evidence that the law is beginning to deliver. But it also raises a foundational question that Ksapa placed at the center of this gathering: is litigation always the right instrument to produce the change the law envisions?
The answer, unsurprisingly, is nuanced. Litigation has irreplaceable virtues. It creates precedent, forces accountability on recalcitrant companies, and sends powerful signals across the market. But it is slow — often five or more years between triggering events and a final ruling — expensive for all parties, and structurally ill-suited to the complexity of globalized supply chains where the relationships among parent company, subsidiary, subcontractor, and affected community frequently resist clean legal categorization. In fragile or conflict-affected contexts, where state institutions are weak or absent, effective judicial enforcement may be illusory regardless of how strong the underlying legal claim.
2. Mediation as a Serious Alternative — Under the Right Conditions
This is precisely where mediation finds its relevance. The working sessions Ksapa facilitated drew on direct operational experience from corporations combined with trade union and academic representatives in conflict governance. Four substantive conclusions emerged.
The first is that mediation can represent a genuinely effective alternative to litigation in a meaningful range of situations — particularly outside the most critical cases involving direct threats to physical safety, where judicial accountability often remains non-negotiable. In disputes involving labor rights in subsidiaries, working conditions across supply chains, localized environmental impacts, or disagreements over the adequacy of a vigilance plan, mediation offers tools that litigation cannot: the ability to craft tailored solutions, to engage the full universe of affected stakeholders rather than just formal plaintiffs, and to produce verifiable commitments rather than injunctions whose implementation is difficult to monitor from a courtroom.
The second conclusion is more operationally demanding: effective use of mediation requires building a genuine internal culture within companies. This means dedicated training for procurement, sustainability, public relations, and even legal teams; organizational processes that identify mediation-eligible situations at the earliest stages of escalation; and a fundamental shift in posture. Too often, mediation is treated as a last resort — invoked only after positions have hardened and trust between parties has collapsed. Experience consistently shows the inverse is true. Preventive mediation, initiated at the first signals of tension and ideally before any formal notice of default, is exponentially more effective than curative mediation attempted under the pressure of imminent litigation. The French Decree of July 18, 2025 on alternative dispute resolution mechanisms reinforces this direction, creating a strengthened legal framework for preventive mediation and establishing a new corps of accredited environmental mediators with dual legal and scientific expertise.
The third conclusion addresses something that often goes underappreciated: beyond mediation itself, the shared experiences from the workshop converge on a central finding — genuine transparency and factual alignment with all stakeholders are the most reliable safeguards against escalation to crisis. The situations that deteriorated into long, costly litigation were frequently those where companies delayed acknowledging the reality of identified risks, minimized early warning signals raised by communities or unions, or attempted to manage situations internally without meaningfully involving affected parties. This dynamic plays out repeatedly across the documented case law.
The fourth conclusion concerns the mediation-litigation interface. The mandatory notice of default that French law requires before any lawsuit can be filed — a three-month window during which the company is formally called to remedy identified shortcomings — was designed as a legal prerequisite, not an invitation to dialogue. But the most recent jurisprudence, including the Chamber 5-12 rulings of June 2024, has reframed it as a phase of pre-litigation dialogue: a window during which a company that genuinely engages with the substance of the claims can still prevent escalation. Companies that use this window strategically — not to buy time but to actually address root causes — consistently achieve better outcomes than those that treat it as a procedural formality.
3. Operational Barriers: What Is Still Getting in the Way
If mediation offers real promise, the March 26 gathering also surfaced the concrete operational barriers that limit its adoption in the duty of vigilance context. These are not theoretical constraints — they are specific, measurable, and worth naming directly.
The first barrier is identifying legitimate counterparts. In a globalized value chain, who speaks for the workers at a third-tier subcontractor operating in a country with weak labor governance? How can a company ensure that the representatives present at a mediation table genuinely hold the mandate and legitimacy to bind the communities or workers they claim to represent? This representativeness question is critical, and the absence of reliable answers helps explain why many informal dialogue processes are ultimately rejected or contested by civil society organizations as insufficiently credible.
The second barrier is building the remediation ecosystem. Mediation does not self-organize. It requires a qualified mediator with dual expertise in both the relevant legal framework and the specific industry and geography involved — someone capable of navigating French commercial law, OECD Guidelines, the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, and the operational realities of a supply chain in Southeast Asia or Sub-Saharan Africa simultaneously. It requires adequate financial resources, clear governance, and robust mechanisms for tracking the implementation of commitments over time. Few companies have built this ecosystem proactively, and many discover its absence only when a crisis is already unfolding.
The third barrier is cultural, and arguably the most structural. Mediation in the duty of vigilance context is not standard commercial mediation. It does not involve splitting a financial difference between two parties of comparable resources. It requires creating a fair and workable dialogue space between a multinational with significant legal and organizational resources, and communities, local trade unions, or NGOs whose capacity is structurally constrained. This fundamental asymmetry demands a genuine corporate commitment to move beyond defensive posturing — an acknowledgment that transparency about facts, even unfavorable ones, is preferable to a protracted crisis management process whose outcome, whether judicial or reputational, is unlikely to be favorable to anyone.
The fourth barrier is early signal detection. Building a genuine vigilance culture — in the literal sense — requires internal systems capable of identifying the early signals that warrant entering mediation before the window closes. This means alert mechanisms that are actually used, social audits that go beyond checkbox compliance, and an organizational disposition to process difficult information without reflexively neutralizing it. The gap between legal obligation and effective practice on this dimension remains one of the most consistent findings across the companies engaged in this space.
One additional dimension emerged from the discussion that deserves particular attention: the fragile context question. Several participants noted that the mediation framework that functions reasonably well in a structured legal environment like France or the EU faces acute additional challenges in conflict-affected countries, weak governance zones, or contexts where basic state protection mechanisms are absent. In these settings — which constitute precisely the highest-risk environments the law was designed to address — mediation can paradoxically be both more necessary and more difficult to implement credibly. Designing mediation approaches that are robust enough to function in these contexts, rather than defaulting to frameworks built for European governance environments, remains an open and urgent challenge.
Conclusion: Building the Vigilance Culture of the Next Decade
Ten years after its passage, France’s Duty of Vigilance Law has demonstrated its legal resilience and its potential to drive real corporate transformation. It has produced demanding jurisprudence, shifted the practices of hundreds of companies, and directly inspired the European CS3D Directive — whose transposition, pushed to 2028 by the December 2025 Omnibus agreement, remains an inescapable regulatory horizon for any company operating at scale in European markets.
But the next decade will be decided less in courtrooms than inside organizations. The question is no longer whether the law applies — jurisprudence has settled that — but whether companies are building the tools, competencies, and internal cultures that allow them to meet their obligations in ways that are substantive, preventive, and genuinely constructive for the people and ecosystems affected by their operations.
Mediation is one of those tools. It is not a panacea, and it does not replace judicial accountability in the serious situations where public accountability is non-negotiable. But in a meaningful range of circumstances, properly designed and properly supported, it can produce faster, more durable, and more transformative outcomes than litigation processes that stretch across the better part of a decade.
Ksapa works alongside companies, investors, and institutions on the operational implementation of vigilance — from risk mapping and alert mechanism deployment to team training and stakeholder engagement. A distinctive added capability: Ksapa designs and scales remediation programs that bring vulnerable actors into value chains and drive measurable improvements in environmental and social practices. If you are looking to integrate mediation into your vigilance strategy, or facing a situation where a preventive approach could make a decisive difference, our team is ready to talk.
Vigilance is a legal obligation. Transformation is a strategic choice.
Président et Cofondateur. Auteur de différents ouvrages sur les questions de RSE et développement durable. Expert international reconnu, Farid Baddache travaille à l’intégration des questions de droits de l’Homme et de climat comme leviers de résilience et de compétitivité des entreprises. Restez connectés avec Farid Baddache sur Twitter @Fbaddache.
