At today’s Legal Affairs (JURI) Committee vote in the European Parliament on the omnibus regulation on EU corporate sustainability laws, both the content of the final agreement, and the political manoeuvring that led to it, point to a deeply concerning process that casts aside the best interest of EU’s nature, climate, and human rights.
“According to the content of the final report, the major source of dissent among political forces was civil liability, which is scrapped from the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive. This will severely gut the effectiveness of the law by undermining victims’ access to justice, eliminating enforcement and turning corporate due diligence into a toothless box-ticking exercise,” said Mariana Ferreira, Sustainability Policy Officer, WWF European Policy Office. “The EU cannot afford to continue diluting its climate and nature commitments when faced with mounting ecological and social crises, which in turn are increasingly damaging European livelihoods, economy and cohesion.”
Last-minute negotiations hinged on delicate political calculations, with most progressive European Parliament groups agreeing to support an unsatisfactory ‘damage control’ package, in order to avoid an even more regressive deal supported by the far-right. However, the prioritisation of short-term political stability over standing firm for stronger environmental and human rights protections is troubling.
The substance of the final version of the report is another major disappointment. The biggest loss is the failure to include EU-wide provisions to hold companies legally accountable for human rights violations and environmental harm, which had been a central pillar of the initial proposal. This omission will significantly weaken enforcement, and leaves victims of environmental and human rights abuses with little recourse.
Additionally, the removal of key implementation mechanisms for climate transition plans marks a serious setback for corporate climate accountability. One of the only remaining positives is the retention of an approach for due diligence that covers the full supply chain based on the risk of impacts instead of only the closest suppliers, but this alone is not enough.
Interinstitutional negotiations (trilogues) on the omnibus are expected to last until the end of 2025. In the meantime, the European Commission is scheduled to propose another omnibus package in November 2025, with the aim of simplifying other environmental laws. WWF has warned that the Commission’s deregulation drive was undermining the EU’s climate and biodiversity targets as well as its global leadership, and that this risk was exacerbated by the political forces in the European Parliament pushing for an ever stronger erosion of environmental safeguards.
