On April 3, the European Parliament ratified a decision to stop the clock on scheduled corporate reporting and compliance requirements–most notably the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), earlier adopted by the European Parliament in December 2022, and the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD), adopted in June 2024. While reporting and due diligence rules may sound anodyne, these aggressive diktats sought to place a large swathe of companies worldwide under the thumb of Brussels bureaucrats. (As the “sustainability” part of their title may suggest, these directives fell under the broader “EU Green Deal” launched in late 2019, which seeks to require companies to reduce carbon emissions by 55 per cent by the of this decade and reach “net zero” carbon emissions by 2050.)
The decision to pause the implementation of these sweeping efforts and potentially scale them back is a salutary move in light of escalating Trans-Atlantic tensions. To wit: on Friday, March 28, the American embassy in Paris sent a questionnaire to French businesses telling foreign-owned firms with which it does business that they have to comply with President Trump’s executive order 14173, which targets race discrimination including various policies promoting “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” The French Ministry of Foreign Trade predictably decried this action as unjustified extraterritorial overreach. But it is hard for European leaders to complain about extraterritoriality when they had been scheduled to tell companies doing more than €450 million in business in Europe, whether or not headquartered on the continent, how to manage human rights, their labour forces, their supply chains, and their environmental stewardship.
Continue reading the entire piece here at Brussels Signal
______________________
James R. Copland is a senior fellow and director of legal policy at the Manhattan Institute. He is the author of “The Unelected: How an Unaccountable Elite is Governing America.” Follow him on Twitter here. Charles Yockey is a Manhattan Institute policy analyst and Budapest Fellow at the Hungary Foundation.
Photo by Sergey Kucherov/Getty Images