Option Droit & Affaires: CSR commitments, a mandatory standard for business partners?
Article by Maxime de Guillenchmidt, partner, published in the Option Droit &affaires letter of July 13, 2021.
Key Points
- Recent rulings from the Paris Court of Appeal confirm the obligation for suppliers to respect the CSR (corporate social responsibility) policy drawn up by their customers, under penalty of seeing their commercial relationship terminated without notice.
- Obligations in terms of social and environmental responsibility are imposed above all on companies of a significant size, but case law has broadened the scope of application of ethical and social standards, they are also imposed on suppliers of small companies which are nevertheless below the thresholds of the Sapin 2 law (500 employees and a turnover greater than 100 million euros) or the law on the duty of vigilance (companies and groups with more than 5,000 employees).
- Compliance with the rules laid down applies to the entire group, which also becomes indirectly responsible for its suppliers and subcontractors due to the mandatory third-party evaluation procedure.
- The regime of sudden termination of an established commercial relationship sheds interesting light on the restrictive nature of the ethical and social rules developed by companies, these are obligatory for their suppliers and subcontractors, even when they are not. signatories; breaches of a group’s ethical charter can justify the immediate termination of relations; the refusal by a commercial partner to sign such internal rules constitutes a sufficiently serious breach to justify a termination of commercial relations without notice.
- There is little doubt that such a violation also justifies, on a contractual basis, the termination of the contract at the fault of the unscrupulous supplier. This will happen more and more often following the now frequent ethical and social audits of suppliers, regardless of company size.
