On Tuesday 27 November 2018, Ms. Joana Nabuco gave a presentation at the annual United Nations Business and Human Rights Forum entitled ‘New insights? When causation, contribution, and direct link overlap: UNGP implementation in “complex complicity” scenarios’. In order to illustrate such a scenario, Ms. Nabuco took Brazil’s Suape Industrial Portuary Complex (‘Suape Port’) as a case study.

At the 2018 UN Forum on Business and Human Rights, the theme of the conference, “human rights due diligence”, was buzzing. As momentum gathers to push the business and human rights debate from the realm of soft guidelines and recommendations into legally binding standards, recent advances, including a new French law on the corporate duty of vigilance, illustrate how due diligence laws are a promising development.