Accountability in the EU for Corporate Human Rights and Environmental Harm: A Tale of Two Systems or Potential for Complementary Twinning?

The EU’s proposed Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive seeks to enhance responsible business conduct through mandatory risk-based due diligence, administrative supervision by national authorities, and civil liability. If adopted the administrative accountability and remedy scheme envisaged by the proposal will exist alongside another corporate accountability mechanism, the National Contact Points established under the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises. Having two parallel systems will likely result in divergent findings on due diligence as well as remedial responses. Such inconsistency will neither benefit companies trying to understand what is expected and demanded in terms of risk-based due diligence, nor affected people who are victims of business-related societal harm. To avoid that, this article argues that a coordinated system in which NCPs are assigned some of the administrative supervision tasks envisaged by the CSDDD (or similar measures that may be introduced by states, if the CSDDD is not adopted) will serve accountability and legal certainty, including for remedy, better than two distinct systems whose overlapping competences may undermine those objectives.