The European Commission has disclosed Wednesday 23 February its bill on good corporate governance. Of bitter negotiations are expected.
by
“This has been a long course,” Lance Didier Reynders, the European Commissioner for Justice. It’s been two years since the European Commission works on a draft sustainable corporate governance directive – a text that aims to compel businesses to better prevent human rights violations and environmental harm throughout. Their supply chain – and the presentation has been repeatedly repulsed. Wednesday, February 23, the Community Executive finally unveiled its legislative proposal.
It introduces a duty of vigilance for companies, which can no longer ignore the risks that their practices, those of their subsidiaries, their suppliers, and suppliers of their suppliers pose human rights. – Child labor, forced labor … – and the environment. Objective: To avoid dramas like that of Rana Plaza, this eight-storey building located in Dhaka, Bangladesh, who housed six clothing making plants working, at the end of the chain, for signs like Mango and Primark and whose collapse. In April 2013, provoked the death of more than 1,100 textile workers and workers. And if, despite everything, it was not enough, allow victims to obtain repairs in Europe, from the clients, who often hide behind a chain of suppliers they can ignore until existence.
Intense lobbying
In this context, when she referred to her project to legislate on this subject, from the beginning of 2020, the commission quickly found between two lights: on the one hand, the employers’ organizations, eager to limit Maximum the new constraints that such a text could pose on their members, on the other, NGOs, activists for a most ambitious directive possible. Didier Reynders does not hide it, he suffered an intense lobbying of these different actors.
In June 2021, Thierry Breton, the Commissioner of the Internal Market, was entrusted with the task of helping his Belgian colleague move forward, which at the time were congratulated the economic circles. But, after all, the draft directive on the duty of vigilance is also a way of avoiding a “fragmentation” of the internal market, as French says. Paris and Berlin have already adopted national legislation on this theme, which do not bear the same level of ambition – the hexagonal law, adopted in 2017, goes further than its German counterpart, in force since last summer – when Other Member States are thinking, including the Benelux countries. “Fragmentation of national rules slows progress in learning good practices,” Judge Thierry Breton.
You have 55.74% of this article to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.