"Duty of vigilance in France: an important step forward despite contrasting decisions," 18 June 2024

...The... Paris Court of Appeal handed down its first three decisions on the basis of the French Law on the Duty of Vigilance...

The Paris Court of Appeal has declared inadmissible the case brought in 2021 by FIDH, Observatorio Ciudadano, Red Ambiental de Osorno and the Ligue des droits de l’Homme against Suez on the grounds of the French law on the Duty of Vigilance. This legal action followed a major health crisis that took place in the town of Osorno in Chile in 2019, [allegedly] attributable to the negligence of one of the Suez Group’s subsidiaries. The associations criticised the company for failing to take the necessary measures to prevent this crisis and the human rights abuses that followed...

...The judges did not rule on the issue of formal notice and considered that the entity targeted within the group was not the correct one... they noted that the company itself had not clarified which entity was liable for the duty of vigilance.

In July 2019, the residents of Osorno in Chile were deprived of water for ten days and a health emergency was declared due to contamination of the drinking water network following another operating incident at Essal. [The] company, controlled by Suez, had... been accused by the Chilean authorities of a number of malfunctions and ongoing failures.