United Nations human rights experts have intervened in the ongoing debate over EU non-financial reporting, calling on Brussels to avoid rowing back on legislation that mandates companies check their supply chains for environmental and human rights abuses.

The UN Working Group on Business and Human Rights has written to the EU setting out its reasons for why the Corporation Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) should be left alone and its key tenets unamended following a process to simplify sustainability legislation.

The letter says the working group “encourages the EU not to reopen the text of the CSDDD,” for a number of reasons including the “legal certainty” it provides companies. In another recent letter, 160 investors called on the EU to “preserve the principles, aims and core substance” of both the CSDDD and the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD).

The UN working group writes: “The CSDDD has an important role to play in ensuring coherence and consistency, and in providing human rights protections in relation to corporate responsibility for adverse human rights impacts, including in relation to the environment and climate change.”

Debate about the future of CSDDD and CSRD has been under way for some months but was given significant momentum last year when Mario Draghi, former chair of the European Central Bank, published a report on EU competitiveness in which he wrote the new sustainability regime was a “major source of regulatory burden”.

Regulation as ‘tariff’

At the weekend in the Financial Times, Draghi argued the EU had created its own “tariffs” through “internal barriers” like regulation.

“These are far more damaging for growth than any tariffs the US might impose—and their harmful effects are increasing over time,” he writes.

Since Draghi’s comments the government’s of France and Germany have called for major changes to both CSRD and CSDDD, including an “indefinite postponement”.

The EU is working on an “omnibus” process to simplify three pieces of legislation—CSRD, CSDDD and the Green Taxonomy—into a single directive.

Billed at first as a move to streamline the legislation, it now seems likely that the proposals, expected before the end of February, could change fundamental principles.

The UN working group opposes change for three reasons: CSDDD offers business “legal certainty”; builds upon the UN’s Sustainability Development Goals; and provides “transparency”.

The working group says it is ready to “engage” with the EU “in relation to any proposals to amend the CSDDD.”