Cross-company grievance mechanism in practice
Learnings from a pilot project in Mexico with the German automotive industry
The concept of a cross-company grievance mechanism in Mexico was developed by the Sector Dialogue Automotive Industry. It was then implemented in cooperation with Mexican partners. A multi-stakeholder board consisting of three German automotive companies, representatives of Mexican and German civil society, trade unions and governments was established.
The pilot phase of the “Mecanismo de Reclamación de Derechos Humanos” (MRDH) ran from May 2024 to December 2025. During this period, a wide-ranging information campaign was conducted, informing over 100,000 people in Mexico about the mechanism. More than 120 submissions were made to the MRDH's online complaints portal. Seventeen complaints were declared admissible under the rules of procedure, and seven of these were resolved.
The cross-company complaint mechanism took into account the entire upstream value chain of the participating companies in Mexico. It complemented the companies' own complaint mechanisms in order to close gaps in human rights protection and accountability.
An accompanying evaluation study now provides insights into the strengths and challenges of the approach and derives recommendations for the further development of individual and collaborative complaint mechanisms. The authors will present the study in an online seminar on 16 March 2026.
Online seminar “Lessons learned from the automotive industry’s cross-company grievance mechanism in Mexico”
Evaluation Study
Prof. Dr. Ulla Gläßer and Mareike Standow, researchers at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder), evaluated the cross-company grievance mechanism MRDH from April to August 2025.
The findings and recommendations can be found in the following study:
Key procedural documents of the MRDH as separate Annex 2 of the study: