EU: Human Rights Watch criticises EU Council's position on Omnibus proposal
"EU Council Turning Supply Chain Law into Window Dressing", 1 July 2025
European Union member states led by France and Germany are walking back on their commitment to protect human rights and the environment in global supply chains, Human Rights Watch said today. On June 23, 2025, member states agreed on a European Council position that, if it becomes law, would hollow out an EU directive on protecting rights in supply chains...
The next step is for the European Parliament to adopt its position on the proposed rollback. This is a crucial and final opportunity for the parliament to take a stand to prevent the directive from unraveling and to retain meaningful protection for victims of corporate abuses...
Efforts to undermine the legislation began in February 2025, when the new EU Commission made a U-turn and advanced the so-called Omnibus proposal to strip the directive of its most important elements...
The EU Agency for Fundamental Rights, the European Central Bank, progressive companies, legal experts and economists, high-level personalities, leading United Nations officials and experts, and the UN Working Group on Business and Human Rights have all criticized the move, urging the EU not to weaken the directive...
Member states have proposed to reduce the directive’s requirements even further, by weakening climate mitigation plans and limiting the scope of the law to companies with more than 5,000 employees and a €1.5 billion net turnover.
Estimations by the Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations under its CSDDD data hub show that such a threshold would exclude 72.5 percent of companies currently covered under the 2024 law, reducing the number to fewer than 1,000...
Human Rights Watch supports this very important initiative by the organizations and urges the Ombudsperson’s office to try to finalize the inquiry as expeditiously as possible, ideally before the final text of the CSDDD is adopted. The inquiry is a major step towards full transparency and accountability in the commission’s decision-making process, helping to ensure it reflects the EU’s core democratic values...