The Promise and the Limits of the Yves Rocher Judgement

In March 2026, the Paris Judicial Court issued a landmark decision in the Yves Rocher case, marking one of the first instances in which a parent company was held liable for harm suffered by employees of a foreign subsidiary. The case offers a rare judicial articulation of how civil liability operates within risk-based human rights and environmental due diligence (HREDD) regimes – moving the focus from the formal existence of compliance structures to their substantive adequacy. However, the Court did not exhaust all its possibilities in the case.

The timing of the decision is particularly striking. With an EU-wide harmonised civil liability regime, the contours of corporate liability are now being shaped at the national level. France, with its duty of vigilance law in force as of March 2017 (embedded in French Commercial Code), is emerging as a key testing ground. The Yves Rocher judgment illustrates both the potential and the limits of this evolving framework: while it strengthens the enforceability of due diligence obligations, it also exposes unresolved tensions – most notably regarding damages and effective access to remedy.

What is particularly notable in the Court’s reasoning is how it operationalises the duty of vigilance. While the law requires companies to establish and implement a vigilance plan, the Court highlights that this obligation cannot be satisfied through formal compliance alone. Instead, the judges ask whether the plan is capable of identifying and addressing concrete risks, particularly at the subsidiary level. In the absence of a clear and methodologically sound risk assessment, the vigilance plan is deemed legally deficient.

The judgment provides one of the clearest judicial articulations to date of how parent company liability can be constructed under a mandatory HREDD regime. By combining general tort principles (Articles 1240–1241 of the Civil Code) with the Duty of Vigilance Law (L.225-102-1 & L.225-102-2 Commercial Code), the Court effectively translates risk-based due diligence into an enforceable standard of civil liability. Its reasoning across the core elements of liability offers broader lessons for the evolving architecture of business and human rights litigation.

In this way, the judgment gives concrete content to risk-based due diligence as an enforceable standard. At the same time, the Court missed an opportunity to clarify that liability under the duty of vigilance can generate autonomous claims, distinct from those arising in employment or tort law at the subsidiary level.

Fault in Risk-Based Due Diligence

In 2018, a mass dismissal of workers took place at a Turkish Flormar factory in, allegedly targeting employees who had joined the Petrol-İş trade union. A group of former workers, supported by the union and two French NGOs (Sherpa and ActionAid), brought a claim before the Paris Judicial Court against the French parent company, Yves Rocher. They argued that the harm resulted from the parent company’s failure to fulfil its duty of vigilance and sought compensation for violations of their freedom of association.

The case, arising from these anti-union dismissals in Turkey, however, goes beyond its factual background. In parallel with these claims, the Court, in its judgment, defined fault as a failure to comply with duty of vigilance obligations, focusing not merely on the existence of a vigilance plan but on its substantive adequacy. Moreover, it positioned the duty of vigilance as an ex ante risk management process, rather than only an ex post conduct, confirming the risk-based due diligence adopted in mandatory HREDD legislation.

While the Court acknowledged that Yves Rocher had formally established vigilance plans for 2017 and 2018, it made clear that the mere existence of such plans was insufficient to discharge its legal obligations. What is required is a plan that is properly designed, methodologically sound, and capable of identifying and addressing relevant risks. In this case, the absence of a clear explanation of how risks were identified, assessed, and prioritised reinforced the finding of fault. This is further supported by Yves Rocher’s own internal audit, which confirmed that the vigilance framework did not adequately cover operational risks.

Risk-based due diligence, in light of the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises on Responsible Business Conduct and the UNGPs, requires companies to identify and understand the most significant adverse impacts on human rights and the environment arising from the activities in their supply chains, and to prioritize them based on severity and likelihood of  harm. This does not give companies any discretion to pick and choose which operations or parts of the supply chain they would focus on based on certain contextual factors – for instance, by prioritizing direct suppliers or those with a higher volume. Instead, it requires them to focus their resources and attention on the impacts on people and the environment that urgently need an intervention.

Yves Rocher judgment shows that a choice to prioritize impacts based on contextual factors would not be deemed methodologically sound, and consequently not in line with a risk-based due diligence approach. The Court’s approach signals a shift from formal compliance to substantive accountability: a vigilance plan that exists but fails to capture relevant risks is treated as legally deficient, and therefore, constitutes fault in terms of civil liability.

Unlawfulness Beyond Borders

While the Court did not treat unlawfulness as a separate, autonomous element, the normative dimension of fault in this case is clearly rooted in the breach of a statutory obligation. This element is particularly important in emphasizing the cross-border reach of HREDD legislation and confirming the applicability of French law to a harm that took place in Turkey.

In this case, unlawfulness arises from a violation of the duty of vigilance as set out under Article L.225-102-1 of the French Commercial Code, which requires companies to identify and prevent salient human rights and environmental risks under a vigilance plan. The Court did not frame this as a distinct analytical step but rather integrates it into the assessment of fault: the failure to comply with a legally binding obligation is sufficient to constitute wrongful conduct.

What gives this aspect particular significance is the Court’s qualification of the duty of vigilance regime as overriding mandatory provisions (lois de police). On this basis, the Court rejected Yves Rocher’s argument that Turkish law should govern the dispute, even though the harm occurred in Turkey. Instead, it applied French law by relying on Article 16 of the Rome II Regulation, which allows domestic mandatory rules to override the otherwise applicable foreign law. In this sense, unlawfulness operates not as a standalone requirement, but as the normative foundation of fault, anchored in a statutory regime that the Court considered both binding and extraterritorial in effect.

Causation Through Preventability

The Court recognized the causal link between deficiencies in the vigilance plan and the damage suffered by the former employees of the Turkish subsidiary by adopting a preventability approach. It concluded that Yves Rocher had sufficient information to identify the relevant risk (the anti-union practices in Turkey) and had the capacity to act, as demonstrated by its subsequent intervention during the crisis. On this basis, the Court held that proper implementation of vigilance obligations would have made it possible to prevent the damage.

This aspect of the decision highlights the functional role of the duty of vigilance in addressing human rights risks within complex corporate structures. Although the Turkish subsidiary is a separate legal entity with its own management, the Court places weight on the parent company’s ability to influence and intervene, thereby implicitly recognising a form of operational control.

Nevertheless, the judgment must not be interpreted to mean that, generally, the more a parent company becomes involved in its subsidiary’s operations and knows its operational risks, the higher the standard of care and due diligence. In the present case, the publicly available information on restrictions to freedom of association in Turkey, findings from the due diligence conducted during the 2012 acquisition of the subsidiaries, and internal company correspondence from April 2018 indicating awareness of unionisation efforts and related tensions, were considered as sufficient proof for the parent company’s knowledge of the risks, and consequently its omission (negligence) of reflecting these in its vigilance plan. This formed the basis for the establishment of the causation between the breach of duty of vigilance and damages suffered by the claimants in the Yves Rocher Case.

Damages and the Limits of Remedy

The Court recognized personal and direct damage suffered by the claimants. It acknowledged that employees of the Turkish subsidiary were dismissed due to their trade union affiliation, constituting a serious infringement of a fundamental right – namely, freedom of association. In fact, the judgment marks the first time that a court has ruled for compensation for the former employees of a transnational subsidiary due to breach of duty of vigilance. This shows the real impact of mandatory HREDD regimes by establishing a civil liability ground that would trigger compensation for rightsholders – the real remedy for human rights violations arising from corporate misconduct.

The Court distinguished between the different types of damages, awarding moral damages for the violation of union rights and material damages for the economic loss arising from the loss of employment. Within this context, the Court rejected the standing of those employees who had settled their claims with the Turkish subsidiary, as in this case it was deemed that the damages had already been compensated. French civil liability, like Turkish law, is based on the principle of compensation for actual loss and does not pursue punitive objectives.

However, the Court’s approach raises significant concerns. The duty of vigilance pertains to the parent company, not to its subsidiary, and gives rise to a distinct basis of liability. Yves Rocher’s failure to comply with its statutory obligations led to both economic and moral damages to the claimants. Nevertheless, the Court adopted a restrictive interpretation by treating the settlement with the Turkish subsidiary as sufficient and final compensation for the losses suffered, including those arising from the termination of employment.

This point of the judgment is particularly controversial. Even with respect to material damages, the Court assumed that the harm compensated through the settlement is identical to the harm arising from the parent company’s breach of its duty of vigilance. This finding is open to challenge, as the legal bases of the claims differ – one grounded in Turkish labour law binding on the Turkish subsidiary as the employer, the other in a statutory duty of vigilance imposed on the parent company by French law. Treating these as the “same damage” risks collapsing distinct forms of liability into a single compensatory framework.

The issue becomes even more problematic with respect to moral damages. The Court itself acknowledged that the violation of freedom of association gives rise to a distinct, non-pecuniary harm. Yet, for employees who signed settlement agreements with the Turkish subsidiary, it also rejected claims for moral damages, effectively treating them as already compensated. This reasoning is difficult to sustain. Moral damage stemming from the infringement of a fundamental right cannot easily be equated with compensation received in the context of an employment dispute, particularly where the parent company was not a party to the settlement.

In this respect, the Court appears to prioritise the principle of avoiding double compensation over a more nuanced recognition of distinct harms and legal bases. The result is a restrictive approach that arguably underestimates the autonomous nature of duty of vigilance liability and its potential to give rise to independent claims for both material and moral damages. This strict interpretation of the law might lead to a loss of trust for the rightsholders in duty of vigilance claims, who would be caught in between receiving compensation for their economic losses from their employer (through a settlement agreement) and potentially achieving remedy for their economic and moral losses from the parent company that has acted in breach of its HREDD obligations (through a civil liability lawsuit). Many rightsholders, who might be in dire need to reach some kind of remedy, would simply take the settlement agreement and refrain from seeking a remedy before French courts, which would take years and a considerable amount of resources, still risking a result that would be unsuccessful. For this reason, the interpretation of damages constitutes the most controversial and dangerous part of the Yves Rocher judgment.

Overall, the Yves Rocher judgment highlights the importance of mandatory HREDD regimes and foreign direct liability cases for corporations, which allow the rightsholders to bypass the judicial and practical obstacles in their countries and seek effective access to justice before other nations’ courts. Yet, by adopting a restrictive approach to damages, the Court risks weakening the very promise of HREDD: effective access to remedy. Whether this tension will be resolved on appeal will be critical – not only for France, but for the future architecture of corporate civil liability in Europe.