Overview On July 20, 2020, Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri introduced the Slave-Free Business Certification Act (“the Act”). If passed, the Act would require every “covered business entity” — defined as any issuer under section 2(a) of the Securities Act of 1933 that has annual, world-wide gross receipts of $500 million — to audit and report on instances of forced labor in their supply chains. Companies that deliberately violate the Act could be liable…
Overview The Alien Tort Statute (“ATS”) has been the subject of several US Supreme Court decisions over the past decade. To summarize its long and complicated past, the ATS is a statute that gives US federal courts jurisdiction to hear lawsuits filed by non-US citizens for torts committed in violation of international law. In recent years, plaintiffs have tried to use the ATS as a vehicle to hold multinational corporations liable for human rights violations…
Note that this post originally appeared on Baker McKenzie’s Sanctions and Export Controls Update blog. On July 1, 2020, the US Department of State, jointly with the US Department of Treasury, the US Department of Commerce, and the US Department of Homeland Security, issued an advisory (the “Advisory”) to caution US businesses about the risks of supply chain links to entities that allegedly engage in human rights abuses including the forced labor of Uyghurs, ethnic…
Financial regulatory and enforcement momentum focusing on environmental, social and governance (“ESG”) issues is building up from recent activities by US, EU and UK financial regulators. As a result, we anticipate that asset managers and financial intermediaries will increasingly seek to obtain and analyze ESG-related data and information from companies in which they directly or indirectly invest. The companies themselves, particularly publicly traded companies, will be expected to provide more ESG-related disclosure. As a result,…