The opening plenary session will introduce the theme of the Forum, being ‘Navigating the Challenges of Our Times: Driving Action on Business and Human Rights’. It will set out broad ideas of how business, States, civil society organisations, rightsholders, and others, can navigate some key issues of business and human rights in these challenging times. These
include the domestic and regional legislative and other actions in Western Europe, and their impact on the region and internationally. It will also raise the international and other developments affecting this region, such as the legislative and other actions by WEOG States, including the USA.

The session will aim to indicate some of the main themes, challenges and opportunities that will be considered throughout the Forum, in relation to actions by governments, business, civil society organisations, rightsholders and others to ensure that businesses are responsible for their actions which have adverse human rights impacts. This will include the challenges of our times, such as the climate crisis, conflicts and security, and AI and technology, as well as how to drive action, with the operationalising of the CSDDD and its enforcement and external impacts. In addition, the session will consider the broader frontier issues of global policy coherence and thinking beyond the UNGPs.

As climate change increasingly affects people’s lives, livelihoods and communities, companies are faced with growing expectations to understand and address the human impacts of climate change. This raises important questions for business practice: 

How should companies be engaging with climate impacts? Should businesses be applying a human rights due diligence approach to climate change? Where are integrated approaches possible and where are there divergences?

Climate change today is not only an environmental challenge, but a defining factor shaping social, economic and human development worldwide. From impacts on workers and communities to supply chains, access to resources and long‑term resilience, climate risks increasingly intersect with core human rights concerns.

Against this backdrop, companies are navigating a rapidly evolving policy and regulatory environment. In Europe and beyond, emerging human rights and environmental due diligence frameworks—including the EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive and national laws in several countries—are raising expectations around how businesses identify, prevent and address adverse impacts. These frameworks offer important reference points, but also leave open practical questions about how climate considerations are meaningfully integrated into rights‑based approaches.

Meeting for the first time in Strasbourg—at the heart of Europe’s human rights ecosystem—this session offers an opportunity to reflect on how businesses can move beyond parallel approaches to climate action and human rights, towards more coherent, people‑centred strategies. The discussion will explore what effective, rights-respecting climate action looks like in practice, and how companies can contribute to solutions that are credible, accountable and responsive to real‑world impacts.

This session will explore how businesses can engage in responsible disengagement, including divestment, in conflict-affected areas. In doing so, it will consider impacts on stakeholders, including local communities and civil society organisations, and the roles of the State. It will also consider circumstances when re-engagement post-conflict can be
responsible.

Issues to be discussed include heightened human rights due diligence, leverage, the role of investors, and meaningful stakeholder consultations to provide decision-useful information for businesses in challenging contexts. While no one conflict situation will be the focus of the discussion, there will be examples provided from a range of conflict-affected areas and business practices. By identifying gaps in current practices and sharing lessons learned from past and present situations, participants will gain insights into how to undertake responsible disengagement and strengthen corporate accountability in conflict-affected areas.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming business at unprecedented speed — reshaping how companies operate, make decisions, interact with workers and customers, and engage with communities around the world. For businesses, this transformation brings extraordinary opportunity: greater efficiency, new markets, and tools that can advance sustainable development and create resilient economies. It also brings real risks — including significant risks to human rights.

AI systems can interfere with the enjoyment of human rights across the business value chain: amplifying bias in hiring and lending decisions, undermining privacy, interfering with labour protections, and enabling forms of surveillance and discrimination that are often invisible, fast-moving and difficult to contest. Yet the same technologies, responsibly used, can open new pathways to inclusion, expand access to services for underserved populations, and help businesses build the trust and resilience that sustainable growth depends on. As AI becomes embedded in core business processes, seizing its opportunities while preventing harm to people is both a business imperative and a shared responsibility.

Governments, international and regional organisations and standard-setters have not stood still. A growing body of international instruments, guidance and tools now offers businesses actionable frameworks for navigating AI responsibly. This panel brings those frameworks to life and examines what applying them looks like in real-world business contexts.

This session will:

• Introduce the most relevant international standards and instruments governing AI from a human rights perspective, and explain what they mean for business in practice;
  
• Explore how AI risk and human rights impact assessment can be operationalised across different sectors and scales of business with real life examples; and
  
• Foster candid dialogue between business, regulators, civil society and international organisations on what works — and what still needs to be done.
  

What is needed to ensure that the CSDDD is effective? Making sure that the core objectives of human rights due diligence are preserved in implementation of the CSDDD; the central role of stakeholder engagement, etc.

What is the role of third parties in supportinghuman rights due diligence? What principles should be in place to ensure thatbusinesses are ensuring that participation in schemes or recourse to service providers are a support not a substitute? What principles should service providers and schemes adhere to? How should this space be regulated?

What is needed to ensure accountability and what approach to enforcement? What mechanisms are available and what is needed to make them effective?

How do we build on the gains from the UNGPs while recognizing their limitations? What alternatives are there to existing business models?

How do we ensure coherence across instruments with global reach? What is needed to ensure meaningful participation, and incorporation, of Global South perspectives?

What is needed to support the effectiveness of EU policy and regulation on BHR? What are the EU’s external action and development cooperation modalities?

The WEOG Regional Forum on Business and Human Rights “Navigating the Challenges of our Time: Driving Action on Business and Human Rights” will provide a valuable opportunity to advance thinking on the key issues arising from recent
developments in the Business and Human Rights field, with a view to identifying possible courses of action to further uphold corporate respect for human rights in the current economic and geopolitical context.

The Closing Plenary will provide an avenue for Forum participants to capitalize on these exchanges by highlighting key issues, gathering participants’ feedback, and enabling the elaboration of a written outcome document.