The member states of the European Union gave their final approval to the Corporate Responsibility Directive today at the Competitiveness Council meeting.
The directive obliges companies to comply with the duty of care in their value chains.
The rules aim to address, among other things, the use of child labor, the impoverishment of biodiversity and the pollution of natural heritage.
The directive applies to companies with more than a thousand employees and a turnover of more than EUR 450 million.
“The directive gives us the opportunity to punish those actors who break their obligations. It is a concrete and significant step towards a better life for everyone”, Minister of Labor of Belgium, which holds the EU presidency Pierre-Yves Dermagne stated.
The Corporate Responsibility Directive has been in the spotlight a lot this spring because the council of the member states considered overturning it. Finland was part of the front that changed the content of the directive.
The Finnish government objected to the clause on the introduction of a class action included in the directive. The matter was finally resolved in the manner required by Finland.
“For us, it was a remarkable achievement that the corporate responsibility directive was passed so that the class action, which was a key issue for us, was left out of it,” the Minister of Labor Arto Satonen (kok) stated after the meeting.
In his opinion, Finland’s advocacy was excellent both at home and in Brussels.
A representative action remained a possibility
The European Parliament gave its own final approval to the directive in its last plenary session of this term in April.
Deputy Speaker of the Parliament Heidi Hautala (vihr) stated at the time that the Finnish government tried to interfere with the legal status of the poorest and most disadvantaged people.
“But that sabotage was not completely successful. The representative action remained in the directive”, Hautala stated.
According to him, it gives trade unions or non-governmental organizations the opportunity to represent the disadvantaged.
On the website of the Ministry of Justice, it is said that a representative action can be initiated on behalf of consumers by a so-called authorized unit. The authorized entity can be a consumer organization or an authority stipulated by law.
Are a representative action and a class action similar in nature and why was it so important for Finland to get rid of the class action, Arto Satonen?
“It was a conscious decision that a class action was left out of the government program. The answer to the representative action question should be asked from the Ministry of Justice’s experts. That’s all there is to the interpretation of the details.”