The European Taxonomy Regulation and the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive: A Human Rights Perspective

Sammanfattning: The EU has over the last few years set up the objective to become climate neutral by the year 2050. To achieve this objective, the European Commission has recognised the need for a massive transition investment into sustainable economic activities. The European Commission has also recognised that this investment cannot be done without the help of private funding which is why the European Commission recently adopted the Taxonomy Regulation that will help entities such as governments and private actors to categorize what activities can be regarded as sustainable and conclusively help the EU in the green transition. As this green transition will have a huge impact on resources allocated to sustainable activities both inside and outside of the EU, the European Commission has also identified the need to incorporate human rights considerations into this framework in what is named ‘the minimum safeguards’. Although these minimum safeguards establish a need for human rights considerations, especially the Bill of Rights and business and human rights frameworks such as the UNGPs and OECD guidelines on multinational enterprises, there is no clear guidance as to how these considerations should be applied in practice. Therefore, the European Commission has proposed a new directive, the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, that will ensure that entities that want their activities to be classified as sustainable must conduct a human rights audit that fulfil several human rights considerations. This thesis examines the relationship between on the one hand the Taxonomy and on the other hand the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive out of a human rights perspective. It finds that there is undoubtedly a clear need for the proposed directive but that the correlation to human rights standards and the reference to the frameworks on business and human rights differ in the two instruments. There are several variations, both in the application and in the integration of the proposed directive. This thesis establishes that the combination of instruments has potential but that the dissonance will potentially undermine human rights concerns in relation to the aspiration of the EU of becoming climate neutral in 2050.