BREAKING NEWS: After Weeks of Conflict, EU Approves Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive

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The European Parliament has approved the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD, aka “CS3D”). CSDDD aims to ensure corporations are accountable for performing due diligence to mitigate adverse impacts relating to the environment and human rights along their global supply chains. These requirements apply to the direct actions of companies, but also to subsidiaries and suppliers both inside and outside the EU.

At the press conference after the approval on 24 April 2024, Lara Wolters, a Dutch Member of the European Parliament, celebrated the result. “I am so proud that the EU can stand tall in the world and say that we are doing our bit to make sure there’s no more products on the market that come at the cost of human lives and environmental destruction,” said Wolters. “We are leading on this. We’re the first bloc to do this, but I certainly hope we won’t be the last.”

Wolters further pointed out that the approval comes on the 11th anniversary of the Rana Plaza disaster in Bangladesh, in which an unsafe industrial complex occupied by workers making clothes for the Western market collapsed, killing 1,134 workers and injuring thousands more. One of the goals of CSDDD is to ensure that Western companies have an obligation to perform due diligence on their supply chains to uncover such abuses and mitigate them before disaster occurs.

“The core elements of this duty are identifying, bringing to an end, preventing, mitigating, and accounting for negative human rights and environmental impacts in the company’s own operations, their subsidiaries, and their value chains,” says the European Commission. “In addition, certain large companies need to have a plan to ensure that their business strategy is compatible with limiting global warming to 1.5 °C in line with the Paris Agreement.”

CSDDD also outlines duties for company directors who oversee the due diligence process and implement it into the corporate strategy, taking account of anything that could impact human rights, climate change, and the natural environment.

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