Following years of intense legislative effort, much political debate, trilogue negotiations between EU co-legislators and a provisional agreement, the European Union's Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (the "CSDDD") on which we have previously reported has received quite the setback, having fallen short of final approval by a qualified majority of the European Council at a meeting on 28 February. By way of reminder, the CSDDD would see a substantive duty on large companies to identify and address the adverse human rights and environmental impacts of their operations, subsidiaries and "value chains". An agreement on the provisional terms of the CSDDD had been agreed between the Council and European Parliament in December 2023. However, following issues earlier this month which included Germany, followed by Italy, vocalising a lack of support and finally, France's late proposal to increase the threshold for in-scope companies, the Member States of the European Union have delayed the endorsement of the directive.
While the future of the CSDDD remains unclear as of now and we watch the European Institutions go back to the drawing board, our ESG Advisory Group will continue to monitor developments on the CSDDD at European level.
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