When a building called Rana Plaza collapsed in Bangladesh in 2013, 1,138 garment workers died. Most were women making clothes for big brands overseas. Seven years later, in Brazil, a mining dam burst and buried entire communities, killing 270 people. These disasters did not happen by accident. Investigators found that companies knew about safety risks but did nothing. Now, a new European law aims to stop such tragedies — but advocates say it needs stronger rules to actually work.
On July 23, Human Rights Watch, a global nonprofit that investigates human rights problems, submitted recommendations to the European Commission. The group is calling for strong guidelines to help companies follow the EU's Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive. This law, passed in 2024, requires large companies to find and fix human rights problems in their own operations and in the factories and mines that supply them. Think of it as a rule that says: if your business sells products in Europe, you must make sure no one is being exploited or harmed to make those products.
But Human Rights Watch warns that companies have already pushed back hard against the law. Lobbying by European and American companies — especially the fossil fuel industry — led lawmakers to weaken the rules in December 2025. The changes reduced how many companies the law covers and pushed back the date when the law takes full effect to July 2029. That delay means more time before workers and communities see any real protection.
To make matters worse, the Commission gave the public only nine weeks to comment on how the guidelines should work. Organizations submitting feedback must also fill out a complicated questionnaire with tight word limits, making it harder for affected groups to share meaningful input.
In its submission, Human Rights Watch stressed that companies must create safe ways to hear from workers, unions, and local organizations where they operate. That means setting up ways for people to report problems — like child labor in factories or toxic pollution from mining — without fear of punishment. The group also emphasized that when harms do occur, companies need to offer real remedies tailored to what victims actually need.
The Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive is the EU's most ambitious step yet toward holding companies accountable for abuses in their global supply chains. Whether it delivers on that promise depends entirely on what the Commission's guidelines say. Human Rights Watch and other groups are watching closely — and pushing for the law to set a high bar, not a low one.