European Parliament rebels against simplified sustainability requirements
Lawmakers rejected part of a simplification package, as the centrist majority was defeated by nine votes
The European Parliament rejected a bill on Wednesday to simplify rules for European businesses on sustainability reporting and due diligence obligations.
The vote comes amid mounting pressure from some EU member states to pass the bill and from the US and Qatar to scale back the EU's due diligence law contained in it, which in their view risks disrupting liquefied natural gas trade with Europe.
What is the law about
The EU's due diligence law (Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive) was adopted in May 2024 and requires companies to check their supply chains for questionable environmental and labour practices.
Companies that fail to comply with these obligations may face a penalty of up to 5% of their net revenue.
The law was strongly criticised by EU states for the administrative burden it would have entailed for the companies. Germany's Chancellor Friedrich Merz even demanded the law be scrapped entirely, saying it hurts European businesses' competitiveness.
A recent letter signed by US Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Qatar's energy minister, Saad al-Kaabi, reported by Reuters, asked the EU to either repeal the law entirely, or remove some of the provisions, like the application to non-EU companies working, the penalties for non-compliance and its requirement for companies to have plans in place to comply with climate change goals.
In February 2025, the European Commission proposed significant changes to the law through a simplification package called "Omnibus I."
The new version prescribes that only companies with more than 5,000 employees — instead of the 1,000 — and with a yearly turnover of €1.5 billion — instead of €450 million — would be obliged to comply with the bloc’s due diligence law.
A clash in the Parliament and with the Council
The Parliament’s political groups forming the centrist coalition that supports the European Commission - the European People's Party (EPP), Socialists and Democrats (S&D) and Renew Europe - found an agreement on this basis, which was eventually rejected by the plenary session.
With 318 votes against, 309 in favour, and 34 abstentions, the lawmakers on Wednesday subverted the decision adopted by the Parliament's Legal Affairs Committee on 13 October.
As the vote was held via secret ballot, there is no track record of how MEPs voted. The groups of the centrist majority together have 409 MEPs, meaning that one fourth of them have either broke ranks, abstained, or did not show up to vote.
According to Parliament sources, some MEPs from Socialists and Renew voted for the rejection, like the ones from German Freie Wähler and the Dutch People's Party for Freedom and Democracy.
Both the far-right and left sides of the Parliament claimed victory for the rejection of the bill.
Patriots for Europe (PfE) and Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) were against the compromise text, as in their view it did not reduce enough the burdens for companies.
"The package contained only minor technical adjustments without delivering real simplification," reads a note from the PfE after the vote.
The Left and the Greens considered, on the contrary, that the original proposal of the EU's due diligence law had been watered down too much by the Commission's push for simplification.
"The vote makes it clear that Parliament is not ready to rubber-stamp a deal that weakens Europe's sustainability framework," said Greens MEP Kira Marie Peter-Hansen.
After this rejection, the Parliament will need to adopt a new position on the file, with amendments to be voted on at the upcoming plenary session in Brussels on 13 November. Negotiations will resume from scratch, meaning that key elements like the threshold of companies affected by the law and its turnout could be reopened.
"This is a disappointment, let’s see what we do now," said a diplomat from a member state after the vote, while officials in the Commission have grown concerned over the gap between member states and the Parliament.
EU lawmakers cut down proposed forest health data collection law
Rejection by the centrist lawmakers axed further negotiations on the draft law proposed by the EU executive for member states to monitor and report on forest conditions.
European lawmakers rejected on Tuesday a draft law to monitor and report on "forest health", which would mandate EU countries to collect data on forestry conditions and enable preparedness against forest fires across the bloc.
The ballot revealed that the far-right and centrist MEPs predominantly voted no in the European Parliament, with 370 votes against and 261 in favour of draft legislation to harmonise data collection on forests and close knowledge gaps about the state of woodlands across the EU.
Tuesday’s vote has effectively killed EU negotiations, following the Parliament’s environment and agriculture committees' previous rejection of the draft proposal on 23 September.
The law, proposed by the European Commission in 2023, was meant to ensure that timely, accurate, harmonised forest data was available across member states, covering the condition of forests, changes in landscape — such as increasing pressures, fires, pests or droughts — with the ultimate goal of making them more resistant to cross-border threats like wildfires.
The Commission’s proposal built on the existing EU forest information entry point, satellite and remote sensing and national inventories, and sought to fill gaps in comparability and completeness of forest information.
Earlier this month, the European Environment Agency sounded the alarm on the declining forest biodiversity across the continent and cited forestry activities as a major driver
Austrian lawmaker Alexander Bernhuber (EPP), who served as lead negotiator on the forest monitoring law in the Parliament's committee for environment, said the group rejected “ideology” and advocated instead for an “effective and efficient” environmental policy.
“The law, as proposed by the European Commission, would have significantly increased bureaucracy in the forest sector," Bernhuber said.
"Foresters, member states, and farmers must be able to focus on preserving our forests, but would have been buried under excessive paperwork. We will continue to work towards a more realistic and achievable approach to environmental protection,” he added.
Portuguese MEP Marta Temido (S&D) leading the legislative file in the Parliament’s environment said that “deliberate blindness” would not help Europe achieve its climate and biodiversity targets.
“By rejecting obligations for geo-referenced satellite data on tree cover loss and forest degradation or data sharing, the EPP has made early detection of threats almost impossible,” said Temido, adding the political groups that backed the rejection were “irresponsible” in the face of increasing wildfires, droughts, and other extremes hitting Europeans harder every summer.
Proposal to be rescuscitated?
On the sidelines of the Environment Council in Luxembourg on Tuesday, Danish Environment Minister Magnus Heunicke was asked whether the EU Council, currently presided over by Denmark, would intervene to resuscitate the legislative file.
"The EU needs to put in strong policies and concrete actions (...) It should be done in a way that isn't overloading small businesses with paperwork and that's what we are going to discuss," Heunicke told reporters.
Riccardo Gambini, forest and bioenergy policy officer at the NGO BirdLife Europe, regretted the Parliament’s rejection, noting that the bloc is facing “ecological collapse”.
“Legislators are recklessly ignoring science and leaving forests open to exploitation for the profit of a few. Foresters, rural communities, and cities will suffer as floods, droughts, and heatwaves grow more frequent and resilience fades,” said Gambini.
Kelsey Perlman, a forest campaigner at the Brussels-based NGO Fern, said the Parliament discarded a "huge opportunity" to improve forest resilience.
“It’s taken years for the EU to even consider sensible forest monitoring rules – years during which a third of its forests have declined in health. When showing where trees are being harvested becomes too politically threatening, we’ve moved from policymaking based on hard evidence to those based on wilful ignorance,” concluded Perlman.
Forest owners opposed the Commission’s proposal from the outset, citing its "unclear added value" and overlap with existing systems.
“Effort on European forest monitoring should instead focus on reinforcing cooperation, technical support, and capacity building among national forest authorities ... rather than on introducing a one-size-fits-all supranational regulatory framework at EU-level,” stated the Confederation of European Forest Owners (CEPF), following the first rejection from the Parliament’s committees.
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