By Claire Bright, Céline da Graça Pires and Raphäelle Jouen
On 12 March 2026, the Paris Judicial Court (34th Civil Chamber) issued a landmark judgment in the developing case law on the French Duty of Vigilance Law.
The Yves Rocher ruling builds on the approach developed in the La Poste litigation, following the injunction issued by the Paris Judicial Court on 5 December 2023 and upheld by the Paris Court of Appeal on 17 June 2025. It also takes the case law a significant step further: for the first time, a French parent company was held civilly liable and ordered to compensate harm resulting from shortcomings in its vigilance plan. While La Poste clarified what an adequate vigilance plan should contain, Yves Rocher addresses the consequences of failing to meet those requirements.
In this blog post, we examine the main lessons that can be drawn from the Yves Rocher decision and consider what its implications are for civil liability under the French Duty of Vigilance Law.
I. Introduction
The dispute originated in the Yves Rocher group’s operations in Turkey. In 2012, Laboratoires de Biologie Végétale Yves Rocher (LBYR), the French company subject to the Duty of Vigilance Law, acquired a majority stake in two Turkish companies responsible for the production and distribution of its cosmetic products. One of these companies, Kosan Kozmetik Sanayi (KKS), operated a manufacturing facility in Gebze, near Istanbul.
In January 2018, the Turkish trade union Petrol-İş launched an organising campaign among KKS employees. Within a few months, 157 of the company’s 379 workers had joined the union, enabling it to seek official recognition as the representative trade union for KKS. Shortly thereafter, KKS challenged the union’s representative status and, in May 2018, a first wave of dismissals was carried out, affecting 132 employees, many of whom had participated in the unionisation effort. Further dismissals of unionised workers followed, continuing into mid-2019, after the first settlement protocol had already been signed.
The dismissals triggered significant social unrest. Demonstrations were organised outside the factory, complaints were filed before the Turkish Labour Inspectorate, and several proceedings were initiated before Turkish courts. According to the findings later relied upon by the Paris Judicial Court, Turkish labour authorities characterised the events as a form of anti-union repression.
Following the emergence of the dispute, LBYR commissioned an external social audit in July 2018, and strengthened its oversight of the Turkish subsidiaries. Collective negotiations were subsequently conducted with worker representatives and Petrol-İş, resulting in the signature of a collective settlement protocol on 8 March 2019 covering 126 dismissed employees. Throughout the proceedings, LBYR maintained that it had responded promptly once informed of the situation by local management in late May 2018, and had taken appropriate remedial measures, including changes to local management and the negotiation of the settlement agreement.
In April 2020, Sherpa, ActionAid France and Petrol-İş formally notified LBYR that they considered the events in Turkey to reveal serious shortcomings in the Group’s vigilance obligations. They argued that the dismissals reflected a foreseeable risk of violations of freedom of association and trade union rights that should have been identified and addressed through the Group’s vigilance plan. They further requested that the company remedy the harm suffered by the affected workers.
In its response of 17 July 2020, LBYR stated that it had published its 2017 and 2018 vigilance plans, though both had in fact only been deposited at the commercial court registry (greffe) in June 2020, several years after the relevant reporting periods and after the formal notice was received.
When no agreement was reached, proceedings were brought before the Paris Judicial Court in March 2022 by the two NGOs, the trade union and an initial group of 34 former employees of KKS, later joined by 47 further voluntary interveners, bringing the total number of individual claimants to 81. The claimants initially sought both injunctive relief and compensation under the French Duty of Vigilance Law. However, after the Yves Rocher group sold the Turkish subsidiaries in 2024, the claim for injunctive relief lost much of its practical significance, and the case ultimately focused on the conditions under which a parent company may incur civil liability for breaches of its vigilance obligations.
The litigation therefore presented the Paris Judicial Court with a series of novel questions concerning the interpretation of the French Duty of Vigilance Law. In particular, it had to determine whether the French Duty of Vigilance Law could apply to harm suffered in Turkey, whether deficiencies in a vigilance plan could amount to a fault capable of giving rise to civil liability, and whether a causal link could be established between those deficiencies and the harm suffered by the dismissed workers. In answering these questions, the Court delivered the first judgment awarding compensation for harm suffered under the French Duty of Vigilance Law.
II. Defining the Scope of the French Duty of Vigilance Law
The first issue before the Paris Judicial Court concerned the applicable law to the dispute. Under EU private international law, this question is governed by the Rome II Regulation, which provides, as a general rule, that non-contractual obligations are governed by the law of the country in which the damage occurs (also known as the lex loci damni). Since the harm suffered by the dismissed workers occurred in Turkey, Turkish law would normally have applied to the dispute. On this basis, LBYR argued that the French Duty of Vigilance Law could not apply to the dispute.
A. The French Duty of Vigilance Law as a Loi de Police
The Rome II Regulation recognises a limited number of exceptions to the application of the law designated by its conflict-of-law rules. In particular, Article 16 permits courts to give effect to the overriding mandatory provisions (lois de police) of the forum. As originally defined by Francescakis and subsequently reflected in the case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union, an overriding mandatory provision is a domestic provision whose observance is regarded as essential for safeguarding the political, social, or economic organisation of the forum State, and therefore applies to situations falling within its scope irrespective of the law otherwise applicable under the ordinary conflict-of-law rules. to any situation closely connected to that State, regardless of the law otherwise applicable under the ordinary conflict-of-law rules.
The Tribunal was therefore required to determine whether the French Duty of Vigilance Law could be characterised as an overriding mandatory provision within the meaning of Article 16. The answer was decisive because, if the Law were so characterised, its provisions could apply notwithstanding the designation of Turkish law under the general conflict-of-law rule contained in the Rome II Regulation.
The classification of a domestic rule as a loi de police is interpreted restrictively under EU law and is subject to two cumulative conditions. First, the rule must protect a fundamental interest of the forum State as defined above. Secondly, the situation must have a sufficiently close connection with the forum to justify the application of that rule notwithstanding the law otherwise designated by the Rome II Regulation.11 Applied to the French Duty of Vigilance Law, these requirements raised two key questions: firstly whether the prevention of serious human rights, health and safety, and environmental harms connected with the activities of French multinational companies constitutes a fundamental interest of the French legal order, and secondly whether the situation had a sufficiently close connection with France to justify the application of the French Law to a dispute concerning workers dismissed in Turkey.
- The protection of a fundamental interest of the French legal order
To resolve the first question, the Tribunal examined the objectives pursued by the French legislator when adopting the Duty of Vigilance Law. It relied extensively on the explanatory memorandum accompanying the 2015 draft legislation, which presented the reform as a response to the emerging international consensus on corporate responsibility reflected in the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights and the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises on Responsible Business Conduct. The parliamentary materials made clear that the legislation was intended to strengthen the accountability of French multinational companies and to prevent serious human rights and environmental harms occurring both in France and abroad.
The legislative history was also significant in establishing the overriding mandatory character of the law. The parliamentary report accompanying the draft law described the Duty of Vigilance Law as a loi impérative, intended to prevail notwithstanding the law otherwise applicable under private international law. In the Tribunal’s view, this demonstrated that the French legislator regarded the prevention of serious human rights and environmental harms connected to the activities of French multinational companies as a fundamental interest of the French legal order.
- The existence of a sufficiently close connection with France
To answer the second question, the Tribunal observed that the vigilance obligations are imposed on companies headquartered in France and concern decisions adopted at the level of the French parent company. These elements established a sufficiently close connection with France to satisfy the second condition under Article 16, even though the alleged harm had materialised in Turkey.
The judgment therefore constitutes the first judicial confirmation that the French Duty of Vigilance Law qualifies as a loi de police within the meaning of Article 16 of the Rome II Regulation. In doing so, it reinforces the cross-border reach of the French law by confirming that vigilance obligations may apply even where the relevant adverse impacts occur abroad. More fundamentally, the decision recognises that preventing serious human rights and environmental harms connected with the activities of French multinational companies forms part of the fundamental interests protected by the French legal order. By confirming the overriding mandatory character of the Duty of Vigilance Law, the Tribunal ensured that French parent companies cannot avoid their vigilance obligations solely because the persons affected, or the resulting harms, are located outside France.
B. International and European Standards as Interpretative Tools
A second noteworthy aspect of the judgment lies in the Court’s extensive reliance on international and European business and human rights instruments. Rather than treating the Duty of Vigilance Law as an isolated domestic regime, the Court interpreted it in light of the broader normative framework from which it emerged.
Most notably, the Court relied on the EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD), notwithstanding the fact that it has not yet been transposed into French law. Rejecting Yves Rocher’s argument that the directive lacked interpretative relevance, and that the proposed Omnibus reforms diminished its significance, the Court treated the CSDDD not as binding law, but as evidence of an emerging European consensus regarding the mandatory nature of corporate human rights due diligence.
The significance of this reasoning extends beyond the present dispute. By relying on the CSDDD despite its future implementation date and the political debate surrounding its reform at the time of the judgment, the Court recognised that the directive possessed interpretative value as an expression of the direction of EU law.
Importantly, the Court also relied on these international and European standards to clarify the substantive content of vigilance obligations. In determining which adverse impacts companies must identify and prevent, it referred to the human rights instruments incorporated into Annex I of the CSDDD, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and ILO Conventions Nos. 87 and 98. These instruments enabled the Court to conclude that freedom of association, the right to organise and the right to collective bargaining form part of the protected human rights that companies must take into account when discharging their vigilance obligations.
The judgment therefore illustrates how business and human rights standards that lack a direct liability mechanism can nevertheless acquire practical legal effect through domestic litigation. By using the CSDDD and the international instruments it incorporates both to confirm the overriding mandatory nature of the French Duty of Vigilance Law and to define the material scope of the law, the Court integrated European and international business and human rights standards into the interpretation of French domestic law.
III. Establishing Civil Liability under the French Duty of Vigilance Law
Another noteworthy aspect of the Yves Rocher judgment lies in the Court’s recognition of civil liability under the French Duty of Vigilance Law. For the first time since the legislation was adopted in 2017, a French parent company was ordered to compensate victims for harm resulting from a breach of its vigilance obligations. In doing so, the Court clarified how the principles of civil liability under Articles 1240 and 1241 of the Civil Code apply within the specific framework of the French Duty of Vigilance Law. The Court successively assessed the three cumulative conditions of civil liability under French law: the existence of a fault, a harm, and a causal link between the two.
A. Fault: Deficient Risk Mapping as a Breach of the Duty of Vigilance
The Court began by recalling that the Duty of Vigilance Law imposes an obligation of means, rather than an obligation of result. Companies are not expected to prevent every adverse impact arising from their activities and supply chains. Rather, they must establish and implement appropriate vigilance measures capable of identifying and preventing serious harms to human rights, fundamental freedoms, health and safety, and the environment.
Against that background, the Court identified the fault not in the dismissals themselves, but in the shortcomings of Yves Rocher’s vigilance process before the harm occurred.
Central to this finding was the group’s risk mapping exercise. Echoing the approach taken in both the La Poste first-instance decision (TJ Paris, 5 December 2023, n° 21/15827) and the Paris Court of Appeal’s judgment (CA Paris, 17 June 2025, n° 24/05193, SUD PTT c/ La Poste), which established risk mapping as the cornerstone of the vigilance plan, the Court confirmed that the adequacy of all subsequent vigilance measures (assessment procedures, mitigation actions, alert mechanisms and monitoring systems) depends entirely on the quality of the initial risk identification exercise.
The Court found that Yves Rocher’s 2017 and 2018 vigilance plans focused primarily on risks associated with suppliers and subcontractors, while failing to identify or assess risks arising from the activities of controlled subsidiaries, specifically the Turkish subsidiary KKS. The plans expressly confined their risk analysis to “supplier and subcontractor” risks, with only a phased plan to extend coverage to subsidiaries from 2019 onwards, maintained even after the events of 2018. This structural gap was confirmed by the company’s own internal audit, commissioned in June 2020, which noted that the vigilance plan “mainly deals with risk management in the supply chain”.
As a result of this exclusion, the plans did not address the risk of serious infringements of freedom of association and trade union rights within the Turkish subsidiary, despite available information indicating that such risks were foreseeable.
The Court rejected the company’s argument that it had chosen to prioritise areas of its value chain over which it exercised less direct control. While the Duty of Vigilance Law allows companies to prioritise risks according to their severity (UN Guiding Principle No. 24), the Court emphasised that such prioritisation must be based on a transparent and coherent methodology, grounded in a genuine assessment of the gravity and likelihood of risks across the full scope of the law, including subsidiaries. A company cannot simply exclude an entire category of activities that falls within the scope of the law.
The judgments make clear that risk mapping is not merely one vigilance obligation among others, but the foundational element upon which the entire vigilance system relies. As the Yves Rocher judgment expressly emphasised, deficiencies in the company’s risk mapping contaminated the effectiveness of the other vigilance measures, since assessment procedures, mitigation actions, and monitoring mechanisms all derive from the risks initially identified. The failure to identify subsidiary-level risks at the outset rendered the other vigilance measures structurally ineffective.
Importantly, the Court also found that neither the company’s internal code of conduct nor the corrective measures adopted after the dismissals could remedy the initial failure. The fault under the Duty of Vigilance Law is established at the moment the plan is drawn up, not cured retrospectively once harm has materialised.
The judgement therefore reaffirmed the fundamentally preventive, rather than reactive, nature of due diligence. The fault capable of triggering civil liability therefore consisted in Yves Rocher’s failure to establish an adequate vigilance plan and, more specifically, in its failure to identify and assess serious risks affecting freedom of association within its Turkish subsidiary.
Having established the existence of a fault, the Court turned to the question of harm.
B. Harm: Violations of Freedom of Association as Compensable Damage
The judgment is particularly significant in the way it defined the interests protected by the Duty of Vigilance Law. Referring to the CSDDD and the international instruments cited in the annex, the Court confirmed that freedom of association, trade union activity and collective bargaining rights are protected human rights that companies must take into account when fulfilling their vigilance obligations.
Relying on witness statements, findings by the Turkish labour authorities, internal company documents and the audit commissioned by LBYR in July 2018, the Court concluded that several employees had been dismissed because of their trade union membership and participation in union organizing efforts. These dismissals constituted serious infringements of freedom of association and gave rise to compensable personal harm. The Court did not, however, automatically validate all alleged harms: it rejected claims relating to occupational health and safety issues and alleged discrimination against women for lack of sufficient objective evidence corroborating those specific grievances.
However, the Court adopted a relatively rigorous approach to admissibility and characterisation of harm. Initially, eighty-one former employees of the Turkish subsidiary brought claims before the French courts. It held that the 72 employees who had already entered into the 2019 collective settlement agreement concerning the same damage no longer had standing to seek compensation before the French courts. Since the protocol expressly covered all rights and claims arising from the workers’ employment relationship, including any claims resulting from their dismissal, the 72 claimants could not relitigate the same harm before the French courts.
As a result, only 9 former employees remained admissible claimants on the merits. Of those nine, the Court awarded compensation to 6: one claimant was excluded because he had already obtained a ruling in his favour before Turkish courts, constituting compensable prejudice already addressed; the others who did not receive an individual award did not establish a harm sufficiently distinct from the harm already remediated. Each qualifying former employee received a total of €8,000 in damages: €5,000 for moral prejudice resulting from the violation of freedom of association and €3,000 for economic prejudice linked to the loss of employment.
In addition to the harm suffered by individual workers, the Court recognised the distinct harm sustained by the Petrol-İş trade union as a result of the anti-union practices within the subsidiary. The Petrol-İş trade union was awarded €40,000 in respect of the collective interests it represents (€30,000) and its own institutional moral harm (€10,000). The court also awarded symbolic damages to Sherpa and ActionAid France.
The judgment therefore confirms that violations of fundamental labour rights may constitute compensable harm under the French vigilance regime and may give rise to remedies not only for individual victims but also, in certain circumstances, for trade unions and other representative organisations.
C. Causation: A Preventive Logic Lowering One of the Main Barriers to Due Diligence Litigation | Significance and Limits
The Court’s treatment of causation is perhaps the most innovative, and most contested, aspect of the judgment.
Establishing a causal link has long been regarded as one of the principal obstacles facing claimants in business and human rights litigation. Even where shortcomings in a company’s due diligence processes can be demonstrated, proving that those shortcomings caused a specific harm occurring within a subsidiary or value chain often remains particularly challenging.
Indeed, the Conseil Constitutionnel, in its decision n° 2017-750 DC of 23 March 2017 (§27), expressly recalled, when reviewing the constitutionality of the Duty of Vigilance Law, that a company’s liability could only be engaged “if a direct causal link (lien de causalité direct) is established between [the breaches] and the damage.” LBYR relied heavily on this argument, contending that no direct causal link existed between the alleged deficiencies in its vigilance plans and the harm suffered by the dismissed workers, since the dismissals were carried out by local management in Turkey. At most, LBYR argued, a properly designed vigilance system might have increased the likelihood of prevention, constituting, at best, a lost chance, and not a certain causal relationship.
The Court rejected that reasoning firmly. Rather than focusing narrowly on who directly carried out the dismissals, the Court examined whether the harm could reasonably have been prevented had the parent company properly fulfilled its vigilance obligations. In doing so, it conducted a detailed factual inquiry into what Yves Rocher knew, and could have known, before the events occurred.
The Court found that LBYR possessed substantial information indicating a risk of anti-union practices in Turkey well before the crisis emerged: the pre-acquisition social audit commissioned in 2012 had already highlighted Turkish companies’ tendency to hinder unionisation to avoid collective bargaining obligations; reports from international bodies including the ILO and the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination documented restrictions on trade union rights in Turkey; and internal communications confirmed awareness of the social tensions at the subsidiary level. On that basis, the Court held that LBYR had sufficient information to identify a serious risk to freedom of association in its Turkish subsidiary and include it in its vigilance plans, long before any harm was caused.
Moreover, once the dismissals occurred, Yves Rocher demonstrated its ability to intervene by commissioning audits, restructuring oversight arrangements and participating in negotiations that ultimately led to a settlement. On the basis of these elements, the Court concluded that, despite the available information, Yves Rocher had failed to identify the risk in its vigilance plan.
For the Court, these elements showed not only that the risk was foreseeable but also that the parent company had the capacity to act. Had the risk been properly identified and integrated into the vigilance process, preventive measures could have been adopted before the dismissals occurred. The Court further held that LBYR’s post-harm corrective actions, commissioning a site audit, restructuring local management, and ultimately reaching settlement agreements, demonstrated that the parent company had the power and means to intervene. From this, it drew the inference that proper identification and treatment of the risk in the 2017 and 2018 vigilance plans could have prevented the harm suffered by the dismissed workers up to 2019.
This approach is particularly significant because it moves beyond a restrictive conception of causation that would require proof of direct involvement in the harmful conduct itself. Instead, the Court recognised that deficiencies in preventive risk management mechanisms may constitute a legally relevant cause of harm when they deprive a company of the opportunity to identify, prevent or mitigate foreseeable risks. This reasoning has attracted substantial doctrinal criticism. By holding that the failure to identify a serious risk is sufficient, in itself, to establish that its materialisation was avoidable, the Court comes close to treating deficient due diligence as a presumption of causation. A second structural criticism targets the use of ex post corrective measures as evidence of ex ante causal capacity: the Court inferred from LBYR’s post-harm interventions (audit, restructuring, settlement negotiations) that it could have acted preventively.
The implications for future litigation are considerable. By accepting that failures in risk identification and prevention may satisfy the causation requirement under the Duty of Vigilance Law, the Court took an important step towards overcoming one of the most significant obstacles traditionally associated with corporate accountability claims. The judgment provides the clearest indication to date that French courts are prepared to treat defective human rights due diligence processes as a genuine source of civil liability where serious harm could reasonably have been avoided.
The Court’s findings on fault, harm and causation mark an important development in the interpretation of the French Duty of Vigilance Law. They demonstrate that the duty of vigilance is not merely a compliance framework, but a mechanism capable both of shaping corporate due diligence practices to prevent harm, and of providing a pathway to remediation for affected stakeholders where a failure to conduct adequate due diligence gives rise to harm.
IV. Conclusion: Key Lessons for Companies
The Yves Rocher judgment, read together with the La Poste rulings, provides the first coherent judicial articulation of what the French Duty of Vigilance Law demands in practice. For companies within its scope, at least three interconnected lessons emerge.
Recommendation 1: Risk Mapping Is the Cornerstone of Vigilance and Its Scope Must Cover All Entities Within the Law’s Perimeter
Both the La Poste and Yves Rocher rulings are very clear: risk mapping is not one vigilance obligation among others, it is the foundational measure upon which all other components of the vigilance plan depend. A defective risk mapping exercise contaminates the entire plan, regardless of whether assessment procedures, mitigation measures, alert mechanisms and monitoring systems formally exist. The courts have now twice confirmed the central importance of risk mapping, while Yves Rocher establishes that a structural failure at the mapping stage may constitute a fault capable of grounding civil liability.
Companies’ subsidiaries are fully within the statutory scope of the Duty of Vigilance Law. A company cannot legitimately exclude its subsidiaries from its risk analysis, even as an initial priority-setting choice, where those subsidiaries generate foreseeable serious risks. Additionally, the methodology by which risks are identified, hierarchised and included or excluded must be transparent, documented and defensible.
A legally compliant vigilance plan must (i) cover the full perimeter of the law: subsidiaries, subcontractors, and suppliers with an established commercial relationship; (ii) rest on an explicitly documented risk identification and prioritisation methodology; (iii) demonstrate why certain risks were assessed as most salient, rather than simply excluding categories of entities; and (iv) be updated as circumstances evolve (LBYR maintained the exclusion of subsidiary risks from its 2018 plan after the Turkish crisis had already materialised).
Recommendation 2: Preventive Action Must Be Grounded in All Available Information and Corrective Measures Cannot Substitute for Ex Ante Risk Identification
The Yves Rocher ruling delivers a clear message: a company will not escape liability by demonstrating that it reacted promptly once harm materialised, if it had sufficient information to identify the risk beforehand and failed to integrate it into its vigilance plan.
For companies, this means that the information feeding risk mapping must be genuinely comprehensive. According to the Court and specifically for the risk of violation of freedom of association, it must draw on: acquisition due diligence and social audits; country and sector risk analyses from reliable international bodies (ILO, OHCHR, OECD); the group’s own internal audit and compliance reports; local management communications; trade union signals; and external stakeholder alerts. Critically, once such information has been received, it must be documented, processed and reflected in the vigilance plan. A company cannot claim it was unaware of a risk that was reasonably foreseeable.
The Court also made a point that warrants particular attention from a risk management perspective: LBYR’s own ex post corrective actions, internal audit, management restructuring, collective negotiations and settlement were used by the Court as evidence that it “had the power and means to intervene” before the harm occurred. Companies should be aware that the judicial logic cuts both ways: demonstrating responsiveness after harm may, paradoxically, be treated as evidence of the capacity for prevention that was not exercised. This does not mean companies should refrain from remediating harm, quite the contrary. But it underscores the importance of documenting that preventive action was equally within the company’s capacity and was genuinely attempted before a crisis emerged.
Recommendation 3: French Vigilance Litigation Operates Within an International Normative Framework and Companies Must Look Beyond the French Statutory Text
Both the La Poste and Yves Rocher rulings confirm that French courts do not interpret the 2017 Duty of Vigilance Law in isolation. In both cases, the courts relied extensively on the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises, ILO Conventions, and the EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD, Directive 2024/1760), despite the fact that the CSDDD has not yet been fully transposed into French law and is itself subject to reform through the Omnibus I.
The practical implication is dual. First, companies must design their vigilance plans with reference to the international standards that courts are using to assess them: the UNGPs’ risk-based due diligence methodology, the severity and likelihood criteria of the OECD Guidelines, and the human rights instruments annexed to the CSDDD (including ILO Conventions Nos. 87 and 98 on freedom of association and collective bargaining). A vigilance plan that meets formal French law requirements but diverges from the methodological approach of the UNGPs and OECD Guidelines is at risk of judicial scrutiny.
Second, companies should not assume that the Omnibus I provisions’ weakening of the EU civil liability framework reduces their exposure under French law. The Yves Rocher Court has clearly signalled that national regimes, including the French Duty of Vigilance Law, remain fully operative as overriding mandatory provisions under Rome II, regardless of whether European harmonisation proceeds.
France is emerging as a testing ground for HREDD litigation that may help shape how courts across the EU approach similar questions as other Member States transpose (or adapt) their own national due diligence frameworks.