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Reuters
2 days ago
- Business
- Reuters
How Europe's ambition to lead on corporate human rights ran into the sand
July 21 - Just over a year ago, the European Union approved a directive that sought to usher in a new era of human rights protection across Europe. The Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) was meant to give investors more visibility on the risks throughout the value chain of investee companies and make non-compliant companies accountable to member-states and to victims of human rights or environmental harm, even in their operations outside Europe. It took five years of wrangling to agree the rules on corporate due diligence and in the end, just 5,400 companies – fewer than 1% of EU firms – and 900 international corporations that do significant business in the EU were expected to be impacted. Since November last year, however, legislators have sought to unpick it, amid heavy lobbying from industry groupings, which argued that the rules meant European companies could not compete with rivals in China and the U.S., where President Donald Trump is rolling back regulation and imposing tariffs on foreign goods. In February, the European Commission introduced the first in what would be a series of Omnibus packages, focused on sustainability and investment and billed as a recalibration of rules 'in a growth-friendly manner'. The Commission said that if implemented, its Omnibus proposals would mean total savings in annual administrative costs of 6.3 billion euros and would mobilise a further 50 billion euros of public and private sector investment in support of policy priorities. The wide-ranging proposals include giving companies an extra year, to 2028, to implement the CSDDD; limiting due diligence to direct – tier one – suppliers unless there is 'plausible information' to justify deeper investigation; and doing away with a harmonised civil liabilities regime, leaving member states to establish their own mechanisms and set their own penalties. Since the first Omnibus package was published, the European Council and the EU Parliament have both made further proposals to reduce the number of companies in scope, and their reporting requirements. The European Council, for example, wants to raise the CSDDD threshold from 1,000 employees and a turnover of 450 million euros to 5,000 employees and 1.5 billion euro turnover. One of the EU Parliament's proposals is to do away with companies' obligation to draw up climate-transition plans. As part of the Omnibus, the Commission also proposed reopening the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Standard (CSRD) under which companies would have to report on implementation of climate transition plans, and the EU Taxonomy. All three work together as a framework for investors providing meaningful information on risk. Both the European Council and EU Parliament have suggested further amendments to the scope and veracity of the CSRD. The proposals reflect wide-ranging criticism from lobby groups. The French Banking Federation had argued that significant divergences between the scope and requirements of the CSDDD and CSRD risk increasing the regulatory burden and that the CSDDD put European companies at a disadvantage compared with international competition. VCI, the trade group for the German chemicals industry, said that 'huge legal uncertainty and incalculable risk' associated with civil liability would likely lead to companies withdrawing from high-risk regions and markets. Opposition has been voiced in the U.S. too, with a bill introduced in the Senate that seeks to protect U.S. firms from the reach of the due diligence law. Pierre Garrault, senior policy adviser at the European Sustainable Investment Forum (Eurosif), says 'The Omnibus initiative now modifies potentially the core substance of these rules. But that's not what businesses and investors wanted. They wanted more guidance, more clarity and less duplication.' And he suggests that the proposed changes in the Omnibus legislation could defeat the main purpose of the CSDDD because just a few companies from a few member states would be in scope. 'That creates a lot of fragmentation in the way that companies can report on sustainability matters and establish their own processes on due diligence when the main objective was to create that EU-wide standardisation, and that single European baseline.' David Ollivier de Leth, a researcher at Netherlands-based Centre for Research on Multinationals (SOMO), shares those concerns. 'The whole point of this law is that you should look at the risks, and the risks are what should guide you, not the size of the company or (its) location.' With businesses potentially now only having to address adverse human rights impacts beyond tier one suppliers if they have 'plausible information' to act on, campaigners are concerned that the Commission's changes would mean companies simply turn a blind eye to potential harms. 'I think it is fair speculation to say (that) it might even incentivise companies not to look for that plausible information because what if I get it, then I might be liable for what I've discovered,' suggests Marion Lupin, policy officer at the European Coalition for Corporate Justice. While a big enough injustice might attract the attention of NGOs, she adds, 'you're very much outsourcing the risk-management to other stakeholders, whose job is not to survey value chains of multinationals. It's very problematic.' Another Omnibus amendment restricts due diligence further by limiting the information corporations can ask for from suppliers with fewer than 500 employees, the so-called VSME standard, a voluntary reporting standard for small- and medium-sized companies developed by the Commission's technical adviser on sustainability reporting. VSME allows companies to assert 'we don't know (about human rights risks in our supply chain), because we're not allowed to ask,' says SOMO's Ollivier de Leth. Ollivier de Leth says SOMO's study of seven major EU supermarket supply chains demonstrates just how much the tier one limitation guts the purpose of the CSDDD. It found that most firms' tier one suppliers were based in EU countries deemed to be at low risk of human rights violations. That is in contrast with the large proportion of more distant suppliers, which originate in countries with a high risk of human rights violations, such as deforestation and land rights abuses found in meat and soy chains, or child labour in cocoa supply chains. Campaigners are also concerned about the demise of harmonised civil liability, which would have ensured that the conditions under which a company can be held liable are the same in every member state. Instead, a hotch-potch of national rules potentially creates a legal minefield, argues the ECCJ's Lupin. Johannes Blankenbach, senior EU researcher at the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre, agrees: 'Harmonised civil liability is very important for remedy, and also as an incentive for a true level playing field among companies of quality due diligence beyond just ticking boxes.' Investing in thorough due diligence also protects companies themselves, he adds. Before the advent of the CSDDD, only a few European countries had implemented due diligence obligations based on international standards framed by the OECD and U.N. Guiding Principles. French law, for example, requires due diligence across the full value chain but is short on detail that can leave it open to interpretation in the courts, say campaigners. Germany's legislation, meanwhile, focuses only on tier one suppliers. That limit followed extensive corporate lobbying, but Blankenbach argues that the way companies have chosen to apply Germany's legislation so far has created the very bureaucracy they sought to avoid, with 'firms performing indiscriminate compliance exercises with all their tier one suppliers, sometimes flooding them with relatively meaningless surveys'. 'It's a bitter irony to see that tier one focus replicated in the Omnibus,' he adds. In April, legal charity ClientEarth and seven other campaign groups filed a complaint with the European Ombudsman, the EU's independent watchdog, accusing the Commission of 'maladministration' for bypassing proper impact assessment and excluding broad public participation in preparing the Omnibus package. Read more They also accused the Commission of consulting industry lobbyists in closed-door meetings before publishing its proposals. In July, the EU Ombudsman wrote to the Commission asking it to justify its decision-making process, and giving it until September to respond. A Commission spokesperson told journalists that swift changes had been needed since the reporting requirements already applied to some companies. "Businesses and member states urgently needed legal certainty to comply with the sustainability framework," the spokesperson said. Some companies and investors are pushing back against the Omnibus. Over 200 have so far signed an open letter stating that 'regulatory simplification can be achieved without compromising on the substance of sustainability rules or their significant benefits for businesses across the EU'. They include EDF, Vattenfall, Ingka Group and the Inter IKEA group, as well as pensions groups, insurers and asset managers – many of whom have already begun implementing and preparing for the due diligence legislation. A spokesperson for Inter IKEA Group and Ingka Group told The Ethical Corporation that it's important the CSDDD doesn't 'turn into a compliance without impact'. 'We advocate for maintaining a risk-based approach beyond our direct suppliers and ensuring that companies can legally access the information needed to identify, prevent and mitigate adverse impacts throughout their value chains.' How much weight those arguments have will become clear this autumn when the European Parliament finalises its position and negotiations between the Commission, European Council and EU Parliament begin. Businesses and investors who are preparing for the new legislation urgently want clarity. Will it come at the expense of rights holders?
The Journal
6 days ago
- Politics
- The Journal
FactFind: What happened when Mairead McGuinness voted against EU refugee rescue missions in 2019?
A PRESIDENTIAL RACE always brings up political choices from candidates' pasts, and Fine Gael's Mairead McGuinness, who announced her candidacy this week, is no exception. McGuinness' 2019 vote against an EU Parliament resolution to resume search and rescue efforts for shipwrecked refugees trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea is one of the choices that's likely to come up during the campaign. It was a non-binding motion , with no costs or legislation attached to it, but its proponents had hoped it would put pressure on the European Commission and member states to do more to save people trying to cross the Mediterranean. Its rejection was met with outrage among the public, civil society organisations and those MEPs who had voted for it. The vote In October 2019, MEPs narrowly voted down the proposal to provide vessels for more search and rescue operations in the Mediterranean. At the time, Europe had been grappling with a political crisis over how to handle large numbers of people fleeing the Middle East and the African continent. There were 1,885 people reported dead or missing in the Mediterranean in 2019, according to the Missing Migrants Project run by the UN's International Organisation for Migration. The EU had until then carried out a number of different operations that aimed to prevent people seeking refuge in Europe from drowning, including operations Sophia and Triton . But a new conservative government in Italy and mounting anti-immigrant sentiment in Europe meant the issue became one of political, rather than purely humanitarian, concern. Italy and Greece had been receiving the majority of refugees, which led to friction among the member states over how those people would be housed and where. That was the political context in which Fine Gael's four MEPs, including McGuinness, voted against the resolution alongside their European People's Party (EPP) colleagues in the parliament. The vote came after an EU-wide search, rescue and anti-human-trafficking operation had come to an end. It also took place on the same day that 39 Vietnamese people were found dead in the back of a lorry in Essex, southeast England – something that MEPs later suggested emotionally charged the debate on Europe's search and rescue missions. The failed resolution had called on EU member states to 'enhance proactive search and rescue operations by providing sufficient vessels and equipment specifically dedicated to search and rescue operations and personnel, along the routes where they can make an effective contribution to the preservation of lives'. It also called for member states 'to step up their efforts in support of search and rescue operations in the Mediterranean'. McGuinness and her fellow Fine Gael MEPs – Maria Walsh, Sean Kelly and Frances Fitzgerald – faced heavy criticism from opposition politicians after the resolution fell just two votes short of being passed. Fellow Irish MEPs – Green Party members Ciaran Cuffe and Grace O Sullivan, Sinn Féin's Martina Anderson and Matt Carthy, and Independents Luke 'Ming' Flanagan and Mick Wallace – all voted in favour of the resolution. Advertisement No votes were recorded for Independent Clare Daly, DUP MEP Dianne Dodds, the Alliance Party's Naomi Long, or Fianna Fáil's Billy Kelleher. The vote marked a shift in EU policy towards asylum seekers. The bloc has since moved away from search and rescue operations and has increasingly treated irregular immigration as a security issue, striking controversial deals with third countries to prevent people from making the crossing from the Middle East and North Africa. Criticism The move to halt search and rescue options was widely condemned by NGOs, as well as opposition politicians. 'Rescuing people from drowning is just that: rescuing people from drowning. There is no nuance to it or for and against,' the Irish Refugee Council said following the vote. At the time, Sinn Féin's Marina Anderson said it was 'a matter of deep shame that four Fine Gael MEPs actively voted to maintain a 'fortress Europe' status quo that has seen thousands of men, women and children drown simply for seeking sanctuary. 'While Fine Gael wax lyrical about the 'four freedoms' of the EU, including the freedom of movement, they are ready to side with their right-wing EU colleagues to ensure these values don't extend to those fleeing destitution, war and persecution.' Labour MEP Aodhán Ó Ríordáin, who was a senator at the time, said: 'Reports that far right and ultra conservative politicians in Europe were applauding the result in the European parliament just says it all. 'During the European Elections the Taoiseach called on voters to 'send our best team' to the European Parliament. This is what they have decided to do.' He also said that it was 'particularly dispiriting when candidates from centre right parties pretend to have progressive politics at election time, but revert to type when lives are at stake'. McGuinness' defence Speaking to RTÉ News at the time, McGuinness defended her vote and said the provision would have required Frontex, the EU border agency, 'to share information with all ships in the region, including traffickers'. McGuinness said that would not have been acceptable and that if the resolution had passed, it would have 'made the situation worse'. 'We had concerns about the actual content of it, not about the objective,' she said. 'A lot of people are just reading what is on social media without looking at the facts of the situation. I will not allow anyone challenge my ethics or morality around saving lives. It is for political gain,' she said. In an interview on RTÉ's Morning Ireland at the time, Maria Walsh also pointed to the Frontex part of the resolution and said sharing information about 'our most vulnerable when they are most at risk is not the way to do it'. Want to be your own fact-checker? Visit our brand-new FactCheck Knowledge Bank for guides and toolkits The Journal's FactCheck is a signatory to the International Fact-Checking Network's Code of Principles. You can read it here . For information on how FactCheck works, what the verdicts mean, and how you can take part, check out our Reader's Guide here . You can read about the team of editors and reporters who work on the factchecks here . Readers like you are keeping these stories free for everyone... It is vital that we surface facts from noise. Articles like this one brings you clarity, transparency and balance so you can make well-informed decisions. We set up FactCheck in 2016 to proactively expose false or misleading information, but to continue to deliver on this mission we need your support. Over 5,000 readers like you support us. If you can, please consider setting up a monthly payment or making a once-off donation to keep news free to everyone. Learn More Support The Journal
Reuters
16-07-2025
- Politics
- Reuters
EU lawmakers reject attempt to curb far right's sway on climate talks
BRUSSELS, July 9 (Reuters) - The European Parliament on Wednesday rejected a proposal to fast-track talks on the EU's new climate target, scuttling a move by liberal, socialist and green lawmakers to try to limit the influence of climate sceptic lawmakers on the goal. The far-right Patriots of Europe group, which rejects EU policies to curb climate change, on Tuesday took on the role of lead negotiators for the 2040 climate target, seeking to steer talks on the goal, which the group said it firmly opposed. Lawmakers rebuffed a proposal on Wednesday to fast-track the negotiations, which would have skipped stages where the Patriots could exert most influence, and limited their ability to set the timings for negotiations. A total of 379 lawmakers rejected the plan to accelerate the talks, versus 300 in favour and eight abstentions. The vote puts the Patriots firmly in the lead for the parliament as it negotiates the final 2040 climate target with EU member countries. The Patriots will now draft an initial negotiating proposal for the parliament. A Patriots spokesperson said the group would not prioritise trying to meet a September deadline for countries to submit new climate targets to the United Nations. "What truly matters is achieving a deal that delivers real benefits for our citizens. Patriots have never negotiated under pressure like traders in a marketplace," the spokesperson said. The Patriots are the third-biggest lawmaker group in the EU Parliament and the group includes the political parties of France's far-right leader Marine Le Pen and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. The Patriots secured the lead negotiating role in a closed-door meeting on Tuesday by outbidding the parliament's biggest group, the centre-right European People's Party, EU officials told Reuters. Green lawmakers said they feared the target would now be watered down or face long delays. "There is an acute danger that the European Union's climate target will be buried," said German EU lawmaker Michael Bloss. The attempt to fast-track the talks failed because it was not supported by the EPP - the party of European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. Dutch EPP EU lawmaker Jeroen Lenaers said the group did not deem the fast-track procedure necessary, and wanted to "improve" the Commission's proposed target to cut emissions 90% by 2040, without specifying further. Some EPP lawmakers have said a 90% target is too ambitious. Governments from Italy to Poland have pushed back this year on ambitious emissions-cutting goals, citing concerns over the costs for industries.
Irish Examiner
16-07-2025
- Business
- Irish Examiner
'Big battle ahead' on EU supports for farming, IFA warns
The Irish Farmers' Association has warned of a "big battle ahead" for vital EU supports for farming, ahead of the publication of the European Commission's proposals for the next EU budget post-2027 and the next Common Agriculture Policy (Cap). Speaking from Brussels, IFA president Francie Gorman said what was emerging about how farming will be funded from 2027 was "very concerning". 'While we will have to examine the specifics in more detail, it is clear that the EU Commission is downgrading the importance of the Cap and food production to allow for greater spending elsewhere,' he said. 'The Cap is being turned into an environmental and social policy. Support for farmers who are producing the most food is being consistently reduced. The commission seem more interested in finding ways to cut payments to individual farmers rather than support them,' he said. "As it stands, the Cap provides an annual injection of nearly €2bn into our rural economy to support food production. 'At a time when Ireland is a net contributor to the overall EU budget, this level of investment in every parish takes on even more significance. Cap has been the cornerstone of the multi-billion export sector that underpins thousands of jobs in regions far from the urban centres,' he said. The EU Commission also needs to be honest with consumers. Cutting Cap funding will reduce food production and lead to food price inflation. 'These proposals will have to be approved by the member states and the EU Parliament, so there is a long journey ahead and we will expect a real fight from our Government and MEPs. 'The EU presidency, which Ireland will assume this time next year for the second half of 2026, takes on added importance. Our Government has to secure the maximum funding for Irish farmers to encourage the next generation to consider farming as a career. "From the Taoiseach down, this has to be front and centre of every discussion across those six months,' he said. Commenting, agriculture minister Martin Heydon said: 'These are complex legislative proposals which will need detailed consideration. The commission is proposing major changes in structure that we will now study in detail in order to better understand the impact on Ireland. 'This publication is just the beginning of a protracted process. Member states will, through the Council of Ministers, begin the process of agreeing a general approach to the commission's proposals, before engaging in line-by-line negotiations with the EU Parliament and the EU Commission. "This will take some time, and I fully expect the progression of these proposals to be a significant feature of Ireland's presidency of the EU Council in the second half of next year.' The minister will host the first meeting of Ireland's Cap consultative committee on Thursday, which will engage in detail on these proposals. Read More Agricultural output price index up 20.7% in the 12 months to May
Al Arabiya
16-07-2025
- Politics
- Al Arabiya
China, EU lifting all restrictions on mutual exchange, says China's foreign ministry
China's foreign ministry on Wednesday said China and the EU parliament were lifting all restrictions on mutual exchange, after the South China Morning Post reported that China had removed 'restrictions' on former EU lawmaker Reinhard Buetikofer sanctioned in 2021.
