► Full Reference: J.-B. Racine, "Obligation de Compliance et droits humains" ("Compliance Obligation and Human Rights"), in M.-A. Frison-Roche (dir.), L'Obligation de Compliance, Journal of Regulation & Compliance (JoRC) and Dalloz, "Régulations & Compliance" Serie, 2024, to be published.

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📕read a general presentation of the book, L'Obligation de Compliance, in which this article is published

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► English Summary of the article (done by the Journal of Regulation & Compliance - JoRC) : The author asks whether human rights can, over and above the many compliance obligations, form the basis of the Compliance Obligation. The consideration of human rights corresponds to the fundamentalisation of Law, crossing both Private and Public Law, and are considered by some as the matrix of many legal mechanisms, including international ones. They prescribe values that can thus be disseminated.

Human rights come into direct contact with Compliance Law as soon as Compliance Law is defined as "the internalisation in certain operators of the obligation to structure themselves in order to achieve goals which are not natural to them, goals which are set by public authorities responsible for the future of social groups, goals which these companies must willingly or by force aim to achieve, simply because they are in a position to achieve them". These "Monumental Goals" converge on human beings, and therefore the protection of their rights by companies. 

In a globalised context, the State can either act through mandatory regulations, or do nothing, or force companies to act through Compliance Law. For this to be effective, tools are needed to enable 'crucial' operators to take responsibility ex ante, as illustrated in particular by the French law on the Vigilance Obligation of 2017.

This obligation takes the form of both a "legal obligation", expression which is quite  imprecise, found for example in the duty of vigilance of the French 2017 law, and in a more technical sense through an obligation that the company establishes, in particular through contracts.

Legal obligations are justified by the fact that the protection of human rights is primarily the responsibility of States, particularly in the international arena. Even if it is only a question of Soft Law, non-binding Law, this tendency can be found in the Ruggie principles, which go beyond the obligation of States not to violate human rights, to a positive obligation to protect them effectively. The question of whether this could apply not only to States but also to companies is hotly debated. If we look at the ICSID Urbaser v. Argentina award of 2016, the arbitrators accepted that a company had an obligation not to violate human rights, but rejected an obligation to protect them effectively. In European Law, the GDPR, DSA and AIA, and in France the so-called Vigilance law, use Compliance Lools, often Compliance by Design, to protect human rights ex ante.

Contracts, particularly through the inclusion of multiple clauses in often international contracts, express the "privatisation" of human rights. Care should be taken to ensure that appropriate sanctions are associated with them and that they do not give rise to situations of contractual imbalance. The relationship of obligation in tort makes it necessary to articulate the Ex Ante logic and the Ex Post logic and to conceive what the judge can order.

The author concludes that "la compliance oblige à remodeler les catégories classiques du droit dans l’optique de les adosser à l’objectif même de la compliance : non pas uniquement un droit tourné vers le passé, mais un droit ancré dans les enjeux du futur ; non pas un droit émanant exclusivement de la contrainte publique, mais un droit s’appuyant sur de la normativité privée ; non pas un droit strictement territorialisé, mais un droit appréhendant l’espace transnational" ("Compliance requires us to reshape the classic categories of Law with a view to bringing them into line with the very objective of Compliance: not just a Law turned towards the past, but a Law anchored in the challenges of the future; not a Law emanating exclusively from public constraint, but a Law based on private normativity; not a strictly territorialised Law, but a law apprehending the transnational space".

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► Full Reference: J.-B. Racine, "Compliance Obligation and Human Rights​", in M.-A. Frison-Roche (ed.), Compliance Obligation, Journal of Regulation & Compliance (JoRC) and Bruylant, "Compliance & Regulation" Serie, to be published

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📘read a general presentation of the book, Compliance Obligation, in which this article is published

____

► Summary of the article (done by the Journal of Regulation & Compliance - JoRC): The author asks whether human rights can, over and above the many compliance obligations, form the basis of the Compliance Obligation. The consideration of human rights corresponds to the fundamentalisation of Law, crossing both Private and Public Law, and are considered by some as the matrix of many legal mechanisms, including international ones. They prescribe values that can thus be disseminated.

Human rights come into direct contact with Compliance Law as soon as Compliance Law is defined as "the internalisation in certain operators of the obligation to structure themselves in order to achieve goals which are not natural to them, goals which are set by public authorities responsible for the future of social groups, goals which these companies must willingly or by force aim to achieve, simply because they are in a position to achieve them". These "Monumental Goals" converge on human beings, and therefore the protection of their rights by companies. 

In a globalised context, the State can either act through mandatory regulations, or do nothing, or force companies to act through Compliance Law. For this to be effective, tools are needed to enable 'crucial' operators to take responsibility ex ante, as illustrated in particular by the French law on the Vigilance Obligation of 2017.

This obligation takes the form of both a "legal obligation", expression which is quite  imprecise, found for example in the duty of vigilance of the French 2017 law, and in a more technical sense through an obligation that the company establishes, in particular through contracts.

Legal obligations are justified by the fact that the protection of human rights is primarily the responsibility of States, particularly in the international arena. Even if it is only a question of Soft Law, non-binding Law, this tendency can be found in the Ruggie principles, which go beyond the obligation of States not to violate human rights, to a positive obligation to protect them effectively. The question of whether this could apply not only to States but also to companies is hotly debated. If we look at the ICSID Urbaser v. Argentina award of 2016, the arbitrators accepted that a company had an obligation not to violate human rights, but rejected an obligation to protect them effectively. In European Law, the GDPR, DSA and AIA, and in France the so-called Vigilance law, use Compliance Lools, often Compliance by Design, to protect human rights ex ante.

Contracts, particularly through the inclusion of multiple clauses in often international contracts, express the "privatisation" of human rights. Care should be taken to ensure that appropriate sanctions are associated with them and that they do not give rise to situations of contractual imbalance. The relationship of obligation in tort makes it necessary to articulate the Ex Ante logic and the Ex Post logic and to conceive what the judge can order.

The author concludes that "la compliance oblige à remodeler les catégories classiques du droit dans l’optique de les adosser à l’objectif même de la compliance : non pas uniquement un droit tourné vers le passé, mais un droit ancré dans les enjeux du futur ; non pas un droit émanant exclusivement de la contrainte publique, mais un droit s’appuyant sur de la normativité privée ; non pas un droit strictement territorialisé, mais un droit appréhendant l’espace transnational" ("Compliance requires us to reshape the classic categories of Law with a view to bringing them into line with the very objective of Compliance: not just a Law turned towards the past, but a Law anchored in the challenges of the future; not a Law emanating exclusively from public constraint, but a Law based on private normativity; not a strictly territorialised Law, but a law apprehending the transnational space".

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

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🎤 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.

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📝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

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► 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.

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► Référence complète : M.-A. Frison-Roche, Automated Compliance, a pertinent tool for Compliance Law, the whole, document de travail, novembre 2022.

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📝Ce document de travail sert de base à une participation à un débat sur "Automated Compliance : "the" solution or "a" solution?, qui déroule dans le Sommet global de Gaia-X  le 17 novembre 2022.  

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►Résumé du document de travail : s'appuyant sur la présentation préalablement faite au débat par un membre de la Commission européenne, il s'agit de souligner trois éléments qui montrent que l' Automated Compliance (ou Compliance by design) est à la fois un outil central, mais qu'il n'est un outil du Droit de la Compliance dont il ne saurait remplir par sa seule performance technologique toutes les fonctions dans un Etat de Droit.

En premier lieu, l'Union européenne semble en difficulté lorsqu'elle veut tout à la fois bâtir un système juridique qui lui est propre sur la base de Lois dont chacune est la pièce d'un gigantesque puzzle pour obtenir une industrie pérenne et autonome dans une économie numérique mondiale totalement renouvelée, ce qui fait peser sur les entreprises une charge considérable d'intégration de toutes ces règles du jeu, tout en affirmant qu'il faut alléger la charge que la "réglementation" fait peser sur elles.

En second lieu, la meilleure solution pour résoudre cette ambition contradictoire est effectivement dans la technologique, les algorithmes intégrant directement les réglementations. Mais plus encore, l'ensemble de ces textes reposent sur une autonomie laissée en Ex Ante aux entreprises européennes pour s'organiser entre elles afin de concrétiser les "buts monumentaux" que l'Union européenne a décidé d'atteindre, dont la réalisation d'un cloud souverain est au centre.

Ainsi la distinction et l'articulation d'un "Droit de la Compliance", défini par ces "buts monumentaux", dont lequel l'intelligence artificielle est un outil, le "tout" (Compliance Law) et la "partie" (Automated Compliance) est essentielle.

En troisième lieu, cette distinction et articulation est non seulement bénéfice mais elle est obligatoire. En effet, même si le Droit de la Compliance constitue une branche du Droit, elle fonctionne dans le système juridique générale, qui ne fonctionne que par l'esprit des textes, les outils algorithmiques ne capturant que la lettre de ceux-ci. Ces tribunaux sont et seront au cœur du Droit de la Compliance, le cas Schrems l'a bien montré. C'est pourquoi la Technologie et le Droit doivent travailler ensemble, et davantage à l'avenir, notamment parce qu'un outil pour l'effectivité du Droit ne pourra jamais rendre compte de la vie même du système juridique.

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