The EU lawmakers have reached a provisional agreement on the EU’s proposed corporate sustainability due diligence directive (CSDDD), outlining rules for companies requiring large businesses to assess and address adverse human rights and environmental impacts in their value chains.
The agreement follows the release of a proposed CSDDD directive by the European Commission in February 2022, and sets out obligations for companies to identify, assess, prevent, mitigate, and remedy impacts on people and planet in upstream and some downstream activities .
While the Council adopted its position on the directive in late 2022 and reached an agreement on the CSDDD with Parliament in December 2023, a vote on its approval in Council was postponed last month. On 28 February 2024, there was an attempt to approve the directive in the Council. However, France significantly scaled back the scope of the new rules to apply only to companies with more than 5,000 employees, instead of the proposed 500 employee threshold, effectively removing roughly 80% of businesses from the CSDDD obligations.
