Sustainable Development of Meat Supply Chain and Human Rights

The essay deals with the problem of social sustainability into the meat supply chain, especially from its workers’ human rights point of view. Of course employees’ human rights should be above all protected by employer. However, when the latter is involved in a supply chain, its decisions are not utterly free, but influenced by the market and, often mainly, by the willingness of the dominant undertaking, at least indirectly. As a result, violation of human right could be tied not just to a choice of employers, but to the decisions of the company which is the leader of the supply chain. From this perspective, the writing first analyses the task of each employer of a meat supply chain regarding the human rights protection of its employees. Then, it checks if there is any chance to involve the dominant undertaking in protection human rights of the employees who work for the others company of a meat supply chain, despite the “privity of the contract” principle. The research takes inspiration from both the experience of some foreign legal systems and recent European Union acts related to this field.