Kick-off meeting for the CSR Award jury

A joint meeting on 7 June 2024 marked the official start of the work of the 13 jury members, chaired by Lilian Tschan, State Secretary at the Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs. The CSR Award, which is to be presented to companies by Federal Minister Heil in spring 2025, focuses entirely on the theme of supply and value chains.

In light of regulatory and legislative initiatives in this field, it seems contradictory to honour companies’ achievements regarding their human rights and environmental efforts with an award. At the same time, the ongoing debate surrounding the Supply Chain Due Diligence Act and the forthcoming European Supply Chain Directive (CSDDD) highlights how far we still have to go before we can make effective efforts towards uniform human rights protection. 

Whilst the recent discussion about suspending the Supply Chain Due Diligence Act is gathering momentum, the actual objective of the Act seems to be fading into the background: at present, criticism of the administrative burden and bureaucracy – that is, the regulatory implementation – dominates, whilst the human rights impact receives hardly any attention. 

“In this debate,” says Christiane Hellar, deputy director of the Hamburger Stiftung für Wirtschaftsethik, “fundamental issues of application must feature more prominently, based on concrete examples of implementation. We must move beyond discussing the ‘whether’ and focus on the ‘how’ in order to bring about real change for those affected.”

It is worrying, she says, how the topic of corporate responsibility is often linked in the public debate, in an anecdotal manner, to issues such as bureaucracy and the burden of regulation, whilst surveys of affected companies have shown predominantly positive and supportive reactions. 

Against this backdrop, the Hamburger Stiftung für Wirtschaftsethik has decided to play an active role on the jury of the CSR Award in order to highlight positive examples of implementation and impact from individual companies as a benchmark for the business community as a whole. 

“By recognising individual companies that have been fulfilling their responsibilities for years or providing innovative solutions to a wide range of requirements, the discussion would be steered towards the key issues of implementation and could thus have an impact extending beyond the companies themselves,” said Hellar.

Full details of the CSR Award, the composition of the jury and the entry criteria will soon be available here: https://www.csr-in-deutschland.de/DE/CSR-Preis/CSR-Preis-2025/csr-preis-2025.html