Very good evening, welcome to everyone here in the lecture hall and in the Zoom room.

I'm very happy that we have a lecture again in hybrid format. We can meet part of some of us,

many of us can meet in this lecture hall room but there are also many of us joining us through Zoom.

It's my extreme pleasure and privilege to welcome Dr. Mirjam Sage-Maas once again, I should say,

to FAU because Mirjam has been at this university before for conferences and also for summer schools

and we have been working with Mirjam and ECHR together with a number of publication projects.

Mirjam Sage-Maas is legal director at the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights and

she's also the program leader on business and human rights in that organization. She's been

very instrumental in a number of high-profile litigation cases in Germany, most notably the

so-called KICK case, a case which has already been discussed in this lecture by various presenters

and obviously Mirjam will tell us about her practice, reflecting on the practice. Mirjam is

a lawyer, she holds a PhD from the University of Frankfurt. She also lectures at the Freie

Universität Berlin. She would lecture at our university if she would have never learned that

but we share her expertise with the Freie Universität Berlin. Mirjam, you have the floor.

Thank you for the invitation. It's very nice. It's also very nice to do this hybrid, to see a couple

of Vian faces. I've been asked to talk about civil litigation in the field of business and human rights

and I think I'll do my best to combine or explain the connection between civil litigation and

human rights and businesses, which is I think at least from a legal perspective not at all

super, not a clear no-brainer. Probably a brief introduction of what ECHR is. So we are

a non-profit organization. We are primarily dedicated to using legal procedures to enforce

human rights and civil rights and our goal is to help persons whose rights have been violated,

who've been negatively affected by, in particular, powerful actors to help them find access in

European and in particular in German courts. We're not only working on cases of human rights,

but we are also working on cases where we are helping survivors and witnesses to access

universal jurisdiction cases. Probably you've been reading in the news about the most recent

judgments in Koblenz on Syria, where quite a high-ranking Syrian official has been sentenced

under the International Criminal Code of the United States of America. And we're also working

on the International Criminal Code of Germany. We've been representing and accompanying witnesses

and passing civil claimants in that criminal procedure, but we're also challenging pushbacks

at the EU borders with several cases before the European Court of Human Rights on this practice of

pushbacks. So when we talk about business and human rights, I think it's important,

or the way I've approached this, and I think me as an organization, I think it's important to think

about what are typical cases or case scenarios in which a lawyer would think about, well,

has there been a business enterprise, a company engaged in a human rights violation? And roughly,

we've been trying to organize our work when we've analyzed into three areas. I still believe that

they do make sense. Obviously, it's always a bit, yeah, making categories is always a tricky

enterprise, but anyways, I think they still make sense. So one is the involvement of companies in

conflict regions and cooperation with repressive regimes. So historically, this is, I would also

say, the most classic field of business and human rights. If you take the Nuremberg trials as sort

of the birthplace of individual responsibility for worst of individuals, not of states, for worst

human rights violations, then that is the Nuremberg trials. And in the Nuremberg trials, it was

already clear for the prosecutors that if you want to really not only look at the government

officials and military officials that have been directly responsible for the commission of war

crimes and other atrocities of the Nazi regime, but if you look more broadly into other societal

actors, you do need to look into the role of what back then was called the industrialists.

And you have then therefore the follow-up trials against Krupp, against IG Farum, managers and

owners. And yeah, I'm losing the third name. So I think that idea and that practice got lost

and was dormant for a number of years. But then the most sort of, you have some of the most

emblematic cases that people still remember is the execution, the extra legal execution of

Ken Samo-Riba, a Nigerian environmental activist who's been executed by the Nigerian military