Credit by Marco
In recent months, something revealing has happened in Brussels.
As right-wing and far-right parties gain ground in the European Parliament, the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CS3D), a key piece of EU legislation that was adopted in 2024, has been significantly weakened, through amendments made during the negotiations. In legal terms, “due diligence” refers to the investigations a company must carry out before entering a contract with a third party to identify and prevent potential harms.
The CS3D was designed to require companies to identify, prevent, and address human rights abuses and environmental harm across their entire operations, not just at home but wherever they operate. However, political negotiations and amendments have narrowed the CS3D’s scope: under the revised version, corporate responsibility now applies only to a company’s own operations, its subsidiaries, and its direct suppliers, leaving the most opaque and abuse-prone parts of global supply chains largely unregulated.
While the directive is legally binding once implemented by member states (who have until 2027 to transpose it into national law), these early compromises reveal that European regulation often prioritises corporate competitiveness over human rights and environmental justice.
The center-right European People’s Party joined forces with nationalist parties, from France’s Rassemblement National to Hungary’s Fidesz and Italy’s Fratelli d’Italia, to push for amendments during the negotiations on the CS3D, before its formal adoption in 2024, which weakened the directive’s scope.
Under the final text, the directive now targets roughly 6,000 companies - only large firms with over 5,000 employees and €1.5 billion in global turnover, whereas earlier proposals would have covered between 7,000 and 17,000 companies.
This is not a minor technical adjustment. It is a political signal the EU sends to multiple audiences. To corporations and investors, it promises that European regulation will not fundamentally disrupt global supply chains. To voters, it frames deregulation as necessary for “competitiveness”. And to civil society, it makes clear that corporate accountability will remain limited. In a context of economic and geopolitical pressure, European institutions are choosing to prioritise the global position of their firms over the extension of legal responsibility.
To understand what is at stake, we need to remember why this directive was proposed in the first place.
In 2013, the Rana Plaza building collapsed in Bangladesh. It housed garment factories producing clothes for international brands. 1,138 workers died. Thousands were injured. Many were sewing clothes for European and North American companies. At the time, no binding European mechanism required companies to account for harms occurring deep in their supply chains. The disaster exposed something the global economy prefers to keep invisible: brands in the Global North benefit from low wages, unsafe conditions, and subcontracting chains that shield them from responsibility. Although later legislation such as the 2014 Non-Financial Reporting Directive requires companies to report on abuses, they are still not legally responsible for them.
The CS3D proposal was put forward by the European Commission in 2022, after years of criticism that existing rules relied too heavily on voluntary commitments and weak reporting obligations. The directive introduced a legal duty to act. The intention was clear: to move from disclosure to responsibility. That principle is now being hollowed out. By limiting responsibility to direct suppliers, the revised version abandons the very part of the supply chain where abuses are most widespread. It raises a deeper question: who is European law really designed to protect?
The weakening of the directive is not surprising. It fits perfectly within Europe’s broader economic model. The prosperity of the Global North still depends on extracting resources, energy, and labour from the Global South at low cost. A strong due diligence mechanism would challenge that structure. It would force corporations to confront the real social and ecological costs of their operations.
Instead, the EU Council justified the rollback “in the name of competitiveness”. Corporate lobbies warned that stricter obligations would threaten investment and growth.
Growth is the keyword here. Because as long as economic expansion remains the overriding political priority, any regulation that seriously limits extraction will be framed as a threat. In that context, protecting human rights and ecosystems becomes secondary.
This logic is not abstract. It reflects a deeper structure that political economists describe as unequal exchange: value flows from resource-exporting regions to industrialised economies, while environmental damage and social disruption remain concentrated in the former.
And this is measurable. A 2023 study found that only 8.5% of European companies rely on supply chains that exploit forced or child labour at the first tier, rising to 82.4% at the second tier and over 99% at the third. In other words, the deeper you look into supply chains, the more exploitation becomes visible.
The so-called « Stop-the-Clock » mechanism adopted in April 2025 as part of an EU omnibus simplification package, postponed key reporting and due diligence deadlines, including the CS3D’s transposition and first compliance phase. These delays, combined with earlier negotiated reductions in scope, signal a continued preference for competitiveness over stronger corporate accountability.
To see what this means in practice, we can look at Uganda and Tanzania.
In 2021, TotalEnergies, a French multinational backed by global investors, launched the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP), a 1,443 km heated pipeline designed to transport crude oil from Uganda to the Tanzanian coast. It is expected to carry more than 200,000 barrels per day. According to the African Institute for Energy Governance, the project could generate around 34 million tonnes of CO2 annually, which is roughly 25 times the current combined emissions of Uganda and Tanzania.
More than 100,000 people have been displaced or are at risk of displacement. Communities have lost their land, their livelihoods, and in many cases any meaningful ability to refuse. Wetlands and biodiversity-rich ecosystems are being sacrificed to oil extraction. Those who have mobilised against the project, such as activists, students and community leaders, have faced arrest and repression.
This is not an isolated case. It is a textbook example of how extractive capitalism works: profits flow upward and outward; risks and destruction remain local.
French NGOs including Friends of the Earth and Survie brought a legal case against TotalEnergies under France’s 2017 Duty of Vigilance Law. In October 2025, the Paris Judicial Court ruled that the company had engaged in misleading commercial practices by presenting itself as a major actor in the “energy transition” while expanding fossil fuel production. The court ordered the company to disclose documents related to its activities in Uganda.
It was a rare and important victory.
But such legal tools remain fragile. If European standards are weakened, countries with stronger laws, such as France’s Duty of Vigilance framework, may face pressure to scale them back in the name of harmonisation and competitiveness. A strong EU directive would have required TotalEnergies to demonstrate real prevention of harm across its entire supply chain. A diluted directive makes that far less likely.
Stronger due diligence laws matter. But they remain corrective tools within a system that prioritises growth.
This is why a degrowth perspective is relevant. It asks a simple but uncomfortable question: can a system based on endless expansion ever be compatible with ecological limits and global justice? By focusing on growth above all else, Europe’s policies lock the Global South into extractive relationships and sacrifice zones.
Degrowth is about reducing material and energy throughput in wealthy economies, shortening supply chains, investing in care and public services rather than extractive industries, and supporting economic sovereignty in the South instead of deepening dependency. Degrowth also means listening to those resisting on the frontlines, from Ugandan students opposing EACOP to garment workers demanding safe conditions. In other words, degrowth aims to address the root causes of harm that due diligence laws can only mitigate.
The CS3D was conceived in a period when the EU showed some willingness to hold corporations accountable for harms in their supply chains. Its weakening today shows how fragile that commitment remains. European law still tends to shield multinational profits rather than ensure that human rights are upheld, both within the EU and in the Global South. This illustrates that, while legislation can make a real difference, its impact ultimately depends on how it is applied and enforced.
But this trajectory is not inevitable.
Civil society mobilisation has already shaped these debates. Legal cases have forced disclosures. Grassroots movements have delayed destructive projects. Public pressure matters.
If we want European institutions to protect people in the EU and beyond rather than multinationals, we need to push in at least three directions:
An economy that depends on low-cost extraction inevitably creates sacrifice zones. Weakening regulation does not correct this imbalance; it entrenches it. Only by combining legal accountability with a shift in economic priorities can Europe begin to fulfil the protective role it was meant to play, rather than reinforce existing patterns of exploitation. The question is whether Europe is ready to confront the economic model that produces this exploitation, or whether it will continue to protect it.
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