The EU is accused of relaxing supply chain management law, which may jeopardize human rights protection and responsibility in all global business practices.

The European Union is on the receiving end following an agreement on June 23, 2025, by a series of member countries, including France and Germany to weaken the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) and the measure, according to experts, tramples on the concept of accountability in international supply chain management.

This command was intended by the law in order to require companies to enforce human rights and environmental transgressions all along their supply chain. It was one of the initiatives of the European Green Deal of 2024, which was to change the voluntary standards into mandatory rules as applied to the supply chain management.

The recent proposal, however, restricts the due diligence to direct suppliers and does not recognize abuses at lower tiers of the supply chain where most of the risks materialize. Human Rights Watch expressed that this would hugely undermine the effectiveness of the law in influencing supply chain management and will compromise the sustainability efforts of the EU.

Critics like the UN, the European Central Bank, and civil society organizations claim that the reforms will favor big companies at the expense of victims of abuse. The revision also narrows the coverage of the law to companies having more than 5,000 employees and a turnover of more than 1.5 billion euros, and by doing so, excludes an almost three-fourths proportion of firms falling within the ambit of the original directive.

The move threatens to disintegrate the supply chain management regulation in the 27 EU states, making it more difficult to enforce and adds more loopholes to the corporate world. The vote of the European Parliament, expected in the near future, is regarded as the last opportunity to fix the initial intention of the directive.

Since the world requires an ethical supply chain more and more, the stakeholders are persuading the EU not to water down the safeguarding of corporate responsibility and human rights observance of the supply chains worldwide.