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.

With the recent adoption in Europe of several legislative measures requiring companies to conduct human rights and environmental due diligence (HREDD) in their operations and business relationships, companies might increasingly rely on external actors and multi-stakeholders or industry initiatives to support their due diligence effort.

When supporting businesses in the successive steps of the due diligence process, external actors exert significant influence on the interpretation and translation into best practices of the general principles of the UNGPs and the HREDD process. External expertise and multi-stakeholder or industry initiatives can have a valuable input in the due diligence process, especially when the circumstances and implications for human rights are more complex. However, the expansion of the market for external expertise can result in wider variation in terms of actors’ competence or the meaningfulness of their support, and in a growing gap between their perceived and actual effectiveness.

Acknowledging the central role of these actors in due diligence, the objective of this session is to identify opportunities which arise as a result of the use of external service providers and schemes, as well as the limitations of these actors and the risks associated with their inappropriate use. This session aims to arrive at principles for responsible use and fitness criteria which should be applied to these service providers and schemes to ensure their role is genuinely supportive of effective due diligence.

This session will examine how accountability and enforcement mechanisms under the CSDDD can be effectively operationalised in practice. As the Directive introduces new obligations for companies, its impact will ultimately depend on the strength, accessibility, and coherence of enforcement frameworks at both national and EU levels. Ensuring that these mechanisms deliver meaningful outcomes for rightsholders remains a central challenge.

 The discussion will explore key elements of effective enforcement, including the role of public supervisory authorities, the interaction between administrative and civil liability regimes, and the importance of overriding mandatory provisions in ensuring the cross-border application of due diligence obligations. Particular attention will be paid to how enforcement frameworks can avoid fragmentation and ensure consistency across jurisdictions.

The UNGPs were endorsed in 2011 at a time when the world was reeling from the consequences of the global financial crisis. Policy makers were scrambling to make sense of the root causes of the crisis and chart a different way forward. In the ensuing fifteen years, scholars, practitioners and policymakers have re-examined some of the main policy and academic assumptions underlying the nature and function of the economy, including in respect to the pursuit of economic growth, the effects of deregulation and privatisation on the provision of public goods, the role of public actors in enabling innovation and value creation and the need to transition towards a green economy and sustainable development.  These new trends in thinking were reflected in a shift in the global policy and regulatory agenda. In the past decade, we have seen a rise in development of mandatory due diligence laws, enhancement of sustainability disclosure obligations as well as a range of complementary, if not perfectly aligned, regulatory measures on sustainable finance, forced labour and modern slavery, environmental protection and climate change and the impacts of tech.   

However, more recently we have seen a backlash against social sustainability and environmental protection, including progress made in the field of business and human rights. This is happening at a time when the existential threat of climate change could not be clearer, and of increased awareness of the human rights abuses which can arise as a result of unchecked corporate power and exploitative economic structures. This backlash and the momentum that preceded it prompts reflection on what is needed to ensure a fair and just economy in which progress towards respect for human rights by business and protection of the environment can be realised. There is a need to examine the capacity of the UNGPs to meet the challenges of the current moment while recognizing the progress made in the last 15 years and examining the state of current practice and promising practices.

This session will consider how business and human rights can be harnessed in global efforts towards a fairer economy. This will present thinking on complementary approaches and whether and how business and human rights standards and methodologies should be further evolved to meet current needs with a view to maximising the impact of the UNGPs.

The deregulatory initiatives being rolled out across the EU pose a significant risk to global policy coherence in the business and human rights landscape. While the stated intention is to boost innovation, competitiveness, and growth, deregulation often creates fragmentation by undermining policy coherence, which if not managed carefully, could undermine the ability of states to meet international obligations relating to human rights and environmental protection.

This panel will explore how these deregulatory trends can undermine policy coherence, leading to a fragmented regulatory landscape and ultimately gaps in accountability. It will also examine how these shifts are reshaping the development of Business and Human Rights (BHR) standards beyond the EU, and what this means for global corporate accountability.

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 provides an opportunity to synthetize the outcomes of Forum sessions. Through higher level interactive discussions the Plenary will distill key issues, gather participants’ feedback and outline ways forward, thereby enabling the elaboration of a written outcome document.