The webinar started with a welcome address from Hrvoje Pauković (Co-Chair of the ELI Croatian Hub; Managing Director of the Croatian Insurance Bureau) who introduced the speaker and the topic of the sixth webinar.

Following the introduction, Uglješa Grušić (Associate Professor at the Faculty of Laws of University College London) delivered a speech on ‘Civil Liability for Human Rights Violations: Developments in Comparative Law’. He presented key findings of a comparative law project that he co-ordinated. The project examined existing mechanisms for bringing civil claims to hold public authorities and private actors accountable for human rights violations in the domestic legal systems of 16 jurisdictions. In his speech, Dr Grušić focused on three key developments: (a) innovative uses of civil law for closing the ‘responsibility gap’ in the business and human rights context (eg, direct parent company liability, secondary liability, unjust enrichment, and beneficial ownership claims); (b) innovative civil claims against public and private actors in which an essential element of the civil cause of action is a violation of public international law (eg, the Nevsun case in Canada and the Mothers of Srebrenica, Urgenda and Milieudefensie v RDS cases in the Netherlands); and (c) proliferation of specific legislation aimed at remedying particular kinds of human rights violation that rely on existing remedial mechanisms of civil law (eg the French Duty of Vigilance Law and Swiss Federal Act on Private Security Services Provided Abroad).

National reports and the findings of the project will be published in the forthcoming book: E Aristova and U Grušić (eds), Civil Remedies and Human Rights in Flux: Key Legal Developments in Selected Jurisdictions (Hart 2022).

The presentation was followed by a Q&A session.

The next ELI Croatian Hub webinar will be held on 8 October 2021.