🚧General Procedural Law, prototype of Compliance Obligation

.🌐follow Marie-Anne Frison-Roche on LinkedIn

🌐subscribe to the Newsletter MAFR Regulation, Compliance, Law 

____

► Full Reference: M.-A. Frison-Roche, General Procedural Law, prototype of Compliance Obligation, Working Paper, 2023-2024.

____

🎤 This working paper was drawn up as a basis for the presentation "Droit de la Compliance et Droit processuel" ("Compliance Law and General Procedural Law") at the colloquium on 13 June 2023, , and then completed for publication.

____

📝It is therefore also the basis for the written contribution, "The General Procedural Obligation, prototype of the Compliance Obligation", in the book to be published Compliance Obligation

____

► Working Paper summary: Thoughts are beginning to be available to describe the relationships to be built between General Procedural Law and Compliance Obligation, if only to explain the Emerging Systemic Litigation in compliance matters, Compliance Law becoming jurisdictionalised. But this does not tell us anything specific, because everything that is caught up in a lawsuit is therefore mixed up with General Procedural Law.

It would even appear that, at first sight, Compliance Law does not give rise to any procedural obligations, since it is designed to be developed on an Ex-Ante basis, avoiding the judge for the enterprise, compliance by design being intended to perfect this alleviation, the presence of judicial proceedings being a failure in itself and because of the delays and uncertainties which are inherently associated with them. It is often in the hope of being protected from legal action that enterprises claim to be able to 'be conform' with all regulations, at all times, in all places, through all the people for whom they are responsible. This is obviously impossible. If it were, enterprises would be condemned in advance in all possible legal proceedings, their sanctions being demanded by everyone, public prosecutor or private prosecutor. But this is to make a grave confusion between Compliance Law with 'conformity', which is merely a tool of this new branch of the Law. 

Nor is it enough to say that the rights of the defence and access to the courts must be respected, which no one denies or should not deny.

The purpose of this study is more to measure how Litigation relating to Compliance Law, i.e. the Obligation on large enterprises to participate in the achievement of Monumental Goals in alliance with the state authorities, of which the duty of vigilance is the most advanced, is transformed, creating not only new procedural obligations but also a new type of Obligation on the part of both parties.

But for the moment we reluctantly accept the procedural logic, notably the presence of judges and not just prosecuting bodies (public prosecutors and colleges of regulatory and supervisory authorities), and lawyers in defence and not just in negotiation, in order to respect the Rule of Law principle, as a sort of tribute paid, a dose of inefficiency in efficacy system. This sets the disciplines against each other, in this case Law on the one hand, Economics and Management on the other. More often than not, we leave it at that, either to admit it and strike a balance, or to regret it and wait to see which logic will prevail, between procedural rights and obligations on the one hand and compliance rights and obligations on the other.

On the contrary, we must reject this logic of communicating vessels.

Indeed, Compliance Law is an extension of Regulation Law; Regulatory Law, which extends beyond sectors and borders, and whose normativity is anchored in the Monumental Goals set by political and public authorities, which aim to ensure that in the future systems do not collapse, or even improve, so that the human beings who depend on them are not crushed by them but, on the contrary, benefit from them.

The result is "Systemic Compliance Litigation", which gives rise to specific procedural principles. First of all, it is important to clarify what a "Systemic Case" is, a concept proposed in 2021, and to which the cases that are now being brought before the courts correspond. The specific nature of these Emerging Systemic Compliance Litigation, disputes which are objective disputes, similar to administrative cases, which fully justifies the presence of the public prosecutor and raises the question of whether there would be a 'natural judge' for these systemic compliance disputes, have major procedural consequences, in particular on procedural rights and obligations: in particular the right to be a party to the proceedings, even if you are a party to the dispute, which is the case for the stakeholders.

The result is a new alliance between Compliance Obligation and General Procedural Law, which gives rise to a Compliance Obligations of a procedural nature within Compliance Law itself. It is no longer necessary to divide Ex-Ante and Ex-Post, but to borrow compliance principles and insert them into jurisdictional procedures, as envisaged by Justice François Ancel (moving from Ex Ante to Ex Post), while it is necessary to insert procedural principles into Compliance Obligations within enterprises (moving from Ex-Post to Ex-Ante), as shown in the book on Compliance Jurisdictionalisation. This is particularly illustrated in relation to the Duty of Vigilance / corporate sustainability due diligence.

This is particularly relevant in relation to three general procedural obligations which must henceforth structure the compliance obligations in the behaviour of the enterprises and parties concerned, even independently of any legal proceedings requirements, since the judge may be called upon to verify their fulfillment on both sides and to encourage them, which gives rise to an Ex-Ante office of the judge: the obligation to discuss (adversarial principle), the obligation to provide information (evidentiary system) and the obligation to demonstrate (principle of the motivation).

In this development, not only is the procedural obligation to provide access, to organise remedies, to listen to the other party - a procedural obligation which can be reciprocal, especially when it involves listening to the other party and taking into account what they say, a trace of which must be found in the reasons given (for example for the vigilance programs) - the procedural obligation then finds its profound nature: to be the prototype of the Obligation of Compliance.

This alliance changes both Compliance Law and General Procedural Law, since it more broadly changes the office of the judge, who must ensure the effectiveness of these procedural obligations in a continuum between Ex-Post and Ex-Ante. But this question of the office of the judge is the subject of a separate contribution in this book.

____

🔓read the developments below⤵️