The French Duty of Vigilance law, adopted in 2017, was the first comprehensive Human Rights and Environmental Due Diligence (HREDD) law to incorporate civil liability, enabling lawsuits against companies for adverse impacts caused abroad. Unlike more recent HREDD laws, there have already been legal actions taken under the French Duty of Vigilance law. This paper examines how civil society actors on both ends of global supply chains have used legal and reputational accountability as part of their campaigns for more responsible business conduct. Based on a comparative analysis of the thirteen lawsuits and ten formal notices presented to date, we make three key contributions. First, we conduct a network analysis to explore what actors have been involved in litigation processes. Our preliminary analysis indicates that while a few European NGOs often take coordinating roles, they collaborate with a diverse range of actors in producing countries, including local NGOs, trade unions, and grassroots organizations. Second, although the considerable challenges associated with transnational lawsuits render legal success highly uncertain, our analysis reveals that civil society organizations often combine litigation with reputational campaigns, seeing it as part of a broader repertoire of contention. Third, an analysis of company responses to such campaigns suggests that companies have often made changes in their HREDD systems, while concrete practices of remediation or remedies for victims have largely been missing to date.
