No official list

The Law on the duty of vigilance does not apply to all French companies. First, it only applies to companies whose number of employees exceeds at least one of the thresholds provided by the Law (5,000 employees within the companies and its French subsidiaries, or 10,000 within the company and its French and foreign subsidiaries). Second, only certain corporate forms (those governed by Article L. 225-102-4 of the French Commercial Code) are concerned.

Yet, to date, no database publicly available provides for this information, and no official list of companies subject to the Law has been made public by the French government.

The relevant databases

Since the adoption of the Law, our organisations have compiled a list of companies that have recognised being subject to the duty of vigilance: some published a vigilance plan in 2018; other recognised being subject by the Law and mentioned that they were in the process of establishing a vigilance plan.

Yet, how to know whether this list is complete? Are there companies that, despite being covered by the Law, did not publish a plan? Is it possible to constitute a list of companies subject to the Law on the basis of available data?

To answer these questions, we reached out to Datactivist, a cooperative specialised in opening and analysing data.

Along with Datactivist, we consulted several French public databases (Sirene and Infogreffe), as well as a financial database (Orbis), that compile data on companies and their number of employees.

For each database and on the basis of the (limited) information referenced therein, we could constitute a list of companies falling within the criteria of the Law.

Some companies have also been reported to us by citizens, NGOs and trade unions who follow our work. In this case, we have studied the available annual accounts of certain companies to establish whether they meet the criteria for the application of the Law.

Our results

As we compare these three lists and the list of companies having recognised being subject to the Law, it results that intersections are extremely limited. We could however:

• Identify the deficiencies of public databases when it comes to corporate data
• Compile a non-exhaustive list of companies that seem to be covered by the Law, as they appear as falling within its application criteria on at least one of the databases we consulted. This is the list of companies that is used as a reference for this website, and which will be updated.
• Review whether the companies on this list have published a vigilance plan and, if yes, publish it on this website
• Note that, to our knowledge, some of these companies have not published a vigilance plan

Vigilance plans published on this website

Companies subject to the law on the duty of vigilance shall establish and effectively implement a vigilance plan. Also, the publication of a vigilance plan is not a sufficient condition to respect the law:

• First, measures included in the vigilance plan must meet certain legal requirements ;
• Second, companies concerned must also implement effectively their vigilance plan to meet the legal requirements

The vigilance-plan website does not adopt a position on the respect, or not, of the law by the companies concerned. It is simply a matter of checking whether the identified companies have published one or more plans and, if so, to list them.

Subsidiaries subject to the law shall be deemed to satisfy the obligations provided if the company that controls them establishes and implements a vigilance plan on them. Because on this provision, we have:

• First, presented our results by keeping independent pages for each of companies in the same group subject to the law, since the subsidiaries are exempted only to the extent that their parent company establishes and effectively implements its vigilance plan.
• Second, referred to the pages of affiliated companies that have published a vigilance plan.

The vigilance plans posted on this website come from the documents published by the companies, in accordance with the legal requirements. It is therefore not possible to draw conclusions about the elements to be included in a vigilance plan, since the website only makes a reference to the document published by the company.

To know more about our methodology (in French):