 This training is one of several events in the framework of the Human Rights in Business Project, which my colleague and coordinator of the project, Katarina Janibas, will introduce to you after my input. You see in today's program that we could gather a very diverse and experienced group of experts, representatives of, as has just been mentioned, NGOs, the European Union, academics, lawyers, judges. And I think the program will offer you insights into judiciary and non-judicial remedies that I think quite thought-provoking and will bring us further down the road on this very topical issue. At this point I would also very much like to thank the team at the Boltzmann Institute of Human Rights without them this day would not be possible. It's in particular Katarina Häusler, who is taking photos right now, so she's always around doing things for today. Julia Planitzer, who has also been involved content-wise in the project and our indispensable interns and fellows, Niki Kumadorakis and Patrick Harris. So thank you very much, and I think they deserve a round of applause. Now the topic of today. I was asked to give some key challenges to the implementation in Europe of the right to remedy. We know that operations of businesses have spread globally, but the regulation of their activities has not kept pace with these developments. Although states have a number of positive obligations on the human rights law, such as the investigation of human rights abuses perpetrated by non-state actors and the protection of people within the jurisdiction from harm caused by these abuses, the remedial structures of human rights law, including national courts and supranational courts, such as the European Court of Human Rights, have struggled to provide access to justice for victims of human rights abuses outside of the jurisdiction. Because one of the most critical issues is that human rights abuses where companies are involved primarily take place outside of the European Union, and there we have a big jurisdiction problem. The activities that give rise to human rights abuses are occurring at various levels, at large multinational companies and their subsidiaries, their suppliers, and those territories have often limited capacity to monitor and effectively sanctions such as human rights abuses. For example, there is a lack of adequate resources, expertise and support for state prosecutors to investigate such abuses. As I mentioned, there is the issue of jurisdiction as well. As a general rule, criminal law is limited to acts done within the territory of the state, and only statutory provisions asserting extraterritorial jurisdiction will criminalize acts committed abroad. For example, the British corporate manslaughter and corporate homicide act of 2007 paved the way for businesses to be charged with crimes, but it does not apply extraterritorially. Also significant practical problems remain, such as controlling the scene of the crime, gathering evidence collections, standards of evidence collection in locations overseas. Member states of the European Union are subject to European legislation governing issues of jurisdiction. The Brussels 1 regulation is particularly important in this regard. Under Article 2 of this regulation, the courts of EU member states are competent to adjudicate the civil proceedings against companies based in the European Union for acts which have taken place outside of the European Union, even where the victim is not domiciled in the EU and the damage also occurred elsewhere. The definition of domiciled in the regulation is also flexible in the sense that it does not rely solely on where the company's office is registered, but looks to where the central administration and its principal place of business is. The Brussels 1 regulation has been interpreted by the Court of Justice of the European Union to preclude states from applying the forum non-convenience doctrine. Under this doctrine, courts can prevent a case from moving forward in the jurisdiction in which it is filed on the basis that another jurisdiction is more convenient for the parties and witnesses, which has posed problems for applicants than to pick the case before the company's home states, for example, to the EU member states. While the removal of forum non-convenience is a positive development overall, the courts of EU member states can only adjudicate cases against defended companies registered and seated in an EU member state, and these nationality and territorial requirements can still discourage victims of corporate-related abuse to litigate in European Union countries, and thereby reducing the accessibility of these remedies. And I'm sure we will hear more about that in the next panel. Another issue is the so-called corporate veil. Corporate veil means that under the principle of separate corporate legal personality, a parent company is, generally speaking, not liable for the conduct of its subsidiaries, simply by virtue of being a shareholder. Litigators have attempted to circumvent the corporate veil by claiming that a company has been directly negligent for harm caused over which it had direct control, instead of alleging its responsibility for the negligence of its subsidiaries. For example, in the UK courts, they have demonstrated a willingness to adjudicate on this issue in transnational business and human rights cases, for example, in the Lube and Ores versus Cape case of 2000, that that was a case taken against an English parent company of a South African subsidiary which manufactured asbestos products. The court, the UK court ruled that even though South Africa was the more appropriate form of jurisdiction, the strong probability that the claimants would be unable to obtain both legal representation and the expert evidence that they needed to substantiate their claims would amount to a denial of justice. This is a positive development, however, quite a few barriers to accessibility remain. Litigating court cases against multinational corporations can be complex, risky, resource intensive, and hard fought by the companies themselves. The costs associated with gathering evidence in a foreign state, the costs of legal and technical experts, and the sheer fact that these cases can take more than a decade to litigate make them very expensive. The variety of human rights abuses that we see today are likely to require a variety of multilateral solutions. It is clear that for a successful regulation of non-state actors there needs to be a synthesis between international standard setting, supervision and accountability, and the rather robust national system of regulation. The main international standard on human rights and business, it has already been referred to today, the UN guiding principles on business and human rights, attempt to address some of these issues. The guiding principles were developed by the UN special representative on the issue of human rights and international cooperation other business enterprises. They're designed to implement the Protect, Respect and Remedy framework. That means the state duty to protect human rights, the responsibility of businesses to respect human rights, and a shared obligation of states and companies to provide access to remedies for human rights violations where they arise. So the topic of today. The guiding principles envisage the creation of a multilateral human rights due diligence framework. This framework is supposed to contain a mix of voluntary and regulatory approaches and of traditional and non-judicial remedies. While effective judicial remedies lie at the core of the system, the guiding principles also envisage the creation of non-judicial remedies on the ground to complement judicial remedies. In the business and human rights context, the term grievance is often used to describe an issue arising between a company and an individual or group of persons. And I'm now quoting the interpretation of the definition of the young guiding principles. Agreements is understood to be a perceived injustice, evoking an individual's or a group's sense of entitlement, which may be based on a law, contract, explicit or implicit promise, customer practice or general notions of fairness of aggrieved communities. Rather than just referring to courts and tribunals, the guiding principles refer to a broader category of grievance mechanisms, which again the principles define as any routinized, state-based or non-state-based judicial or non-judicial process through which grievance is concerning business-related human rights abuse can be raised and remedy can be sought. You see, it's a broad definition, but it contains also a certain vagueness and possibility can be raised, maybe sought. And this also points at the voluntary nature of these kind of remedies. But as we will see later today, non-judicial remedies have a lot of potential to give access for victims of human rights violations to get remedy. I would like to close with giving you a very short introduction to the criteria that the guiding principles apply for in particular company and operation-level grievance mechanisms so that they can be considered as effective according to the guiding principles. First, they must be legitimate, so they must have a clear, transparent and independent governance structure. They must be accessible to the target group, both in terms of resources information and so on. It must be a predictable structure. There must be a clear timeframe, a clear procedure. It must be equitable so that the complainants have unfair and equitable footing access and follow-up to the procedure. They must be rights compatible so that the remedies themselves and the outcome comply with international human rights standards. And, and that has been a big issue also with non-judicial grievance mechanisms, they must be transparent. It must be obvious that how the process goes, how the outcomes have come about so that it can be, yeah, from the outset it can be seen how the system kind of works. And a last principle that is maybe a little bit overlooked in the current debate and I think has a lot of potential to both to create a good mechanism and to develop the mechanism further is engagement and dialogue of the company in most cases so that before establishing the mechanism consult the relevant stakeholders, get their input and also in the implementation of the mechanism keep the dialogue going and continuously improve the mechanism. So these are essentially the characteristics that any grievance mechanism according to the guiding principles should have in order to be effective and these are sort of maybe rudimentary still but they are guidelines for companies to set up such a mechanism. Given the problems that I have outlined earlier with judicial remedies we witness a real proliferation of non-judicial remedies to address this governance gap that we are facing. There are however important limitations to non-judicial grievance mechanisms in particular company grievance mechanisms. Certain human rights abuses above all a severe human rights violations should not be dealt with by non-judicial mechanisms. They must go to a functioning court system. Also systemic problems that require state policy action or legislative action such as for example changes in labor law cannot be dealt with by non-judicial mechanisms. It was interesting to see in our research that when we looked at a number of grievance mechanisms such as the Fair Labor Association which is a multi-stakeholder initiative and the grievance mechanism of a sportswear corporation, Adidas that they were faced with a majority in the majority of cases with trade union issues with collective labor rights with systemic issues and those issues can be dealt with more or less successfully on the factory level with these non-judicial grievance mechanisms but the root causes of these problems cannot be solved and we will hear later today what the non-judicial remedy process can or cannot deliver. So it will be a second panel on this and also in the afternoon we will present research findings on that. So it's a challenging and very interesting road that we are taking. The Access to Remedies project that we are thankful to be a partner of and a training today will provide some answers and will probably erase even more questions. I look forward to the day and I hope it will be interesting. Good morning everyone. I'd like to extend also my thanks as we've heard this morning from many. It takes a lot of work to put a training session together and it can't be underestimated and not only on behalf of the organizers the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Human Rights but also the sponsors today the European Commission Austrian Federal Ministry of Labor Social Affairs and Consumer Protection and the Austrian Chamber of Labor and very important thanks to all of you for being here. I think the fact that this room as large as it is is practically full is a strong testament to the interest in this topic which is really why we're here because we want to create interest, bring attention to these issues not only research but really disseminate sorry give it a moment to the technicians for their work. What we're trying to do is put the project website up to give you a couple of resources and tips on how to continue your participation after today's training session. So my objective now in just a few brief moments is to speak to you about the Human Rights and Business Project, our goals our work streams and most importantly to extend an invitation let you know how you can get involved, how to participate in the work of our project going forward. So the Human Rights and Business Project is designed to research teach and disseminate solutions for business and human rights challenges for cross border litigation in the European Union. The project is co-funded by the European Commission Directorate General for Justice and coordinated by the Glovernance Institute for Democratic Governance in San Sebastian Spain. The project commenced in September 2014 and we will present our final results to the European Commission in Brussels in September 2016. The consortium is composed of leading academics and practitioners from across six EU member states many of whom are present today. Those institutions are the University of Navarra, Frank Bold Society University of Castilla La Mancha University of Jaume Uno University of Rovira in Vigilin Case Van Dam Consultancy of course the Ludwig-Waldsman Institute of Human Rights, Tilburg University Utrecht University Leiden University the Public University of Navarra the Law Offices of Quatre Casas Consalves Verdeira Chemep University, Humboldt University University of Deusto University of the Basque Country so we have a diverse group researchers as you can see and the deliverables of this research consortium will take the form of a four part report and a handbook for activists and victims. The report will focus in four areas jurisdiction, applicable law corporate obligations and the topic of today nonjudicial mechanisms. Alongside our research we have two other main work streams training and dissemination of our results to a wide array of stakeholders since the commencement of this project we've held two previous training sessions the first in San Sebastian Spain in February 2015 and Tilburg in the Netherlands earlier this year in June 2015 so thank you for being part of our third training session here in Vienna so I don't think we'll be able to connect I'll explain walk you through it anyhow we might be able to put up the image but effectively you can follow our results so far at our website www.humanrightsinbusiness.eu there you'll have podcasts videos of our previous training sessions publications from our research consortium and other relevant publications the idea is for you to be able to read watch, listen and participate through that site moreover there is a section to participate we've posted certain questionnaires that you are each individually invited to submit your ideas and feedback into that can make our way into our results and into our reports so you are as mentioned asked to share your ideas your experience if it's up if not it's alright there is a section clearly marked participate it's a place for you to also in a free form way leave any thoughts and feedback after today's training session throughout the duration implementation of our project for updates you can also follow us through social media we have a twitter account so today we've already began some feedback on twitter at humanbusiness.eu sorry with the hashtag humanbusiness.eu so today if you want to leave your impressions as well it would be a place to do so and if you follow through from the homepage it would be a place where you can participate where I mentioned earlier we might have a slower connection effective what you'd see here is a list of the videos the podcast, the reading material and spaces for feedback I just wanted to effectively introduce you to the site and hopefully after today's interest and involvement in this topic you'll be inspired to let us know your thoughts, share your feedback and get involved in the project today