Paris court makes Yves Rocher's parent pay for union sackings at a Turkish factory

A French court has for the first time ordered a French parent company to compensate foreign workers for harm suffered at an overseas subsidiary under the country's 2017 duty of vigilance law. On 12 March 2026 the tribunal judiciaire de Paris, 34th chamber, deciding case RG 22/04017, found that Laboratoires de Biologie Vegetale Yves Rocher, the parent of the cosmetics group, had breached articles L. 225-102-1 and L. 225-102-2 of the French Commercial Code by leaving its own subsidiaries out of its risk mapping.

The facts are narrow and old. The Yves Rocher group acquired 51 per cent of two Turkish companies in 2012. In January 2018 the union Petrol-Is recruited heavily among factory workers. Dismissals followed in May 2018. IndustriALL Europe, the union federation to which Petrol-Is is affiliated, puts the number sacked at 132 and says 81 of them joined the French claim. A settlement agreement signed in March 2019 covered 126 employees, according to a dispatch published by the French legal service Lexbase.

The court's reasoning matters more than the sums. It classified the vigilance provisions as overriding mandatory rules, a loi de police, and applied them through article 16 of the Rome II Regulation, so French law governed damage that occurred in Turkey. It held that risk mapping under the statute must cover subsidiaries and not merely suppliers and subcontractors, that the 2017 and 2018 vigilance plans contained no analysis of subsidiary risks at all, and that those plans were not published until June 2020. Limitation, the court said, ran from publication of the defective plan rather than from the dismissals. Management, it found, plainly knew of the risk to trade union freedom and had both the information and the capacity to act.

The remedies were modest. The court awarded 40,000 euros to Petrol-Is and one euro each in symbolic damages to the French non-governmental organisations Sherpa and ActionAid France, which brought the case alongside the workers. On the individual awards the published accounts diverge. The Business and Human Rights Journal blog and the practitioner site Due Diligence Design both report 8,000 euros to each of six former employees. The Lexbase dispatch presents 8,000 euros as the figure for the employees taken together. Of the 81 individual claimants, 72 were barred because they had accepted the 2019 settlement, two failed to show their job loss was connected to union activity and one was in separate negotiations, leaving nine with standing.

That exclusion is the sharpest point of criticism. Writing on Voelkerrechtsblog on 8 May 2026, Pinar Kara argued the court treated a settlement with a Turkish employer as full compensation, conflating an employment claim against the subsidiary with an autonomous statutory claim against the parent, and that appellate clarification on damages is what will decide whether the law delivers effective remedy. The law firm Gibson Dunn, reviewing the decision in March 2026, reached a similar conclusion about the significance of the standing rulings while noting the judgment is not final. Yves Rocher said it had taken note of the ruling and was waiting for formal notification before deciding whether to appeal, while restating its commitment to the principles of the duty of vigilance.

The statute itself reaches very few companies. Article L. 225-102-4 of the Commercial Code, as published on Legifrance, applies only to companies with at least 5,000 employees in France or 10,000 worldwide across the group. It requires five things: a risk map, regular assessment of subsidiaries, subcontractors and suppliers, mitigation actions, an alert mechanism developed with unions, and a scheme to monitor effectiveness. The plan and an account of its implementation must be made public in the management report. Charles Russell Speechlys noted on 1 April 2026 that these obligations closely resemble those of the European Union's Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, which is why a case about a shampoo factory is being read as a template.

No Australian law offers the same route. The Modern Slavery Act 2018 requires reporting, not action, and creates no civil liability for harm in a supply chain. The Commonwealth response of December 2024 to the statutory review accepted 25 of 30 recommendations but declined, at that point, to impose a due diligence system on reporting entities. On 30 January 2026 the Office of the Australian Anti-Slavery Commissioner published a position paper recommending a mandatory risk based due diligence obligation and a power for the Commissioner to declare products, services or industries high risk. Walk Free, writing in February 2026 as consultations opened, argued that transparency alone has not reduced harm after almost a decade.

What is not yet known is whether Yves Rocher has appealed, whether the damages approach survives if it has, how many of the pending French vigilance claims will now be reframed around risk mapping rather than outcomes, and whether Canberra will legislate a duty or leave disclosure as the whole of the obligation.