Organisations face fines of up to 10% of annual global turnover or £18 million (whichever the greater) for failure to comply.

By Gail Crawford, Rachael Astin, Alain Traill, and Katie Henshall

On 15 December 2020, the UK government published its full response to the Online Harms White Paper consultation, which sets out final proposals for the new regulatory regime. The response confirms that companies in scope will face a range of new obligations relating to both illegal and harmful content, in addition to the threat of significant fines and other sanctions in the event of non-compliance. The proposed regulatory framework will be introduced in 2021 in the form of the Online Safety Bill.

The response comes more than a year and a half after the Home Office and the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) first published the Online Harms White Paper in April 2019, which proposed a new compliance and enforcement regime to tackle online harms. In February 2020, the government set out preliminary details of the proposed regulatory regime as an initial response to the white paper. For background to this consultation, see Latham’s previous blog posts (White Paper launch; government interim response).

By Paul Davies, Michael Green, Samuel Pape and Charles Rae

In a recent decision, the High Court has ruled that Unilever plc (Unilever), the ultimate holding company of the Unilever Group, does not owe a duty of care to protect the employees and residents of a tea plantation owned and operated by a Kenyan subsidiary from ethnic violence carried out by armed third party criminals.

This decision is the third time in less than 12 months that an English court has considered a jurisdictional challenge to proceedings brought by foreign claimants seeking to hold a UK domiciled parent company liable for the alleged acts and omissions of an overseas subsidiary. Similar challenges were made in Lungowe & Ors v Vedanta Resources plc & Anor and more recently in Okpabi & Ors v Royal Dutch Shell plc & Anor with the courts reaching opposite conclusions on their respective facts. Our blog on the decision in Okpabi can be found here.

These cases are significant in the context of multinational corporate groups and the circumstances in which a parent company may be held liable in negligence for the actions and omissions of its subsidiaries.