Rights as Usual

Since January 2025, I have been leading a new Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence on Corporate Sustainability and Human Rights Law. The Centre is established at Wageningen University with focal points in Ukraine – Yaroslav Mudriyi National Law University, Kharkiv – and Serbia – Belgrade Centre for Human Rights. Here you can read more information about the aims and future activities of the Centre. To follow our work, please connect with the Law Group of Wageningen University on LinkedIn.

On 18 February, we held a hybrid launch event on Corporate Sustainability in Action: Advancing EU Accession for Candidate Countries in Wageningen and online. More than 200 people joined the event.

We were fortunate to have a stellar line-up joining us in person.

In the first panel, Heidi Hautala, Jeroen Verburg, and Alexandra Kuxová discussed how to navigate uncertainty in the context of the Omnibus proposal currently being discussed in Brussels which threatens to water down the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive.

In the second panel, Lyra Jakuleviciene, Sinisa Milatovic, Maryna Kupchuk, Christine Kaufmann and Sonja Toskovic discussed the implications of the EU Corporate Sustainability Framework in EU candidate countries, with a focus on challenges and opportunities.

In the afternoon, we had two academic and practitioners panels featuring Martijn Scheltema, Otto Hospes, Eva Gerritse, Kateryna Buriakovska, Sonja Toskovic, and Daria Nagaivska.

If you have missed it, we are working on cleaning up the video recording of the event, and we will post it shortly. In the meantime, I am sharing below the text of my opening remarks.