Listen to Julia Otten, Senior Policy Officer at Frank Bold and Andreas Rasche, professor of Business in Society at Copenhagen Business School and author.
In this new Frankly Speaking episode, Richard Howitt and his guests ask what is really happening in Europe's Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD), the proposed law on how companies identify, prevent and remedy human rights and environmental abuses in their global supply chains.
Given political agreement by EU governments and members of the European Parliament before Christmas 2023, some governments undertook a volte face and indicated they would not support the law at the final administrative stage, when it would normally be nodded through without even discussion.
To guide us on why this is happening and what will happen now, Richard is joined by Andreas Rasche, professor of Business in Society at Copenhagen Business School and author of the book Corporate Sustainability, and Julia Otten, Senior Policy Officer at Frank Bold and lead on the Responsible Companies’ work on Corporate Due Diligence.
In this episode, you’ll hear more about:
“What is the aim of the CSDDD? It is to level the playing field. So what you want at the end of the day is to create common standards throughout Europe. If you now reject the CSDDD, you do the exact opposite because then German companies still have their German law, French companies still have their French law. And in a sense, this might even within Europe, create competitive misalignments or even competitive disadvantages.”
There's very little pressure being applied to companies by investors looking at how they're actually behaving and treating human rights as a core business priority. This needs to change.
Investors shouldn't just take companies' word for what they're doing; they should investigate what the companies are actually doing regarding human rights.
Germany's NewClimate Institute has produced the Corporate Climate Responsibility Monitor report, evaluating the transparency and integrity of climate pledges of 51 major companies across different sectors and geographies.
