Drive Sustainability’s Grievance Escalation Platform, a collective mechanism designed to significantly increase the remediation impact of OEMs and their Tier-1 suppliers by enabling them to jointly address serious human rights violations within their supply chains successfully resumed its development in 2025.
Why Collective Action Matters
The Grievance Escalation Platform was originally developed to fill a gap in human rights remediation identified by OEMs and suppliers, as they often individually lack the necessary leverage and supply chain visibility to resolve serious grievances beyond Tier 1. The need of a collective approach is amplified by international frameworks such as the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights and due diligence requirements of recent legislation, such as the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) and the EU Batteries Regulation (EUBR).
Therefore, Drive Sustainability designed this platform to enable OEMs and suppliers to jointly manage salient grievances in the shared supply base. By coordinating action for serious cases, the platform’s ambition is both to strengthen access to effective remedy and to utilize a repository to identify and prevent systemic risks.
Overcoming Legal Challenges
Designing Rules of Procedures that meet competition-law requirements has been the main obstacle to launching the platform. To resolve this, Drive Sustainability worked closely with Contrast, a law firm with strong expertise in competition law, building a robust legal framework integrating necessary safeguards at every stage of the grievance escalation process.
With the framework in place, Drive Sustainability held two workshops with its OEMs and their respective competition lawyers to resolve potential competition law concerns and agree on shared solutions. Upon concluding these sessions, the lawyers approved the platform as a way forward to begin its pilot phase in 2026.
For more information, please reach out to Riccardo Pezzano at rp@csreurope.org
