Dr. Chris O'Connell:

I thank the Deputy for his question. Another piece of work that we as a coalition and we in Trócaire do is supporting the work toward a UN treaty on business and human rights. That would be to create a set of standards and mechanisms for enforcement and access to justice at a global level. That would drive a race to the top globally, not only in Europe. It is an EU competency but we have yet to see the EU come to the table with a negotiating mandate after nearly 11 years of this ongoing process. That is a puzzling one.

In terms of what else, it has been mentioned and the Deputy mentioned it himself but the exclusion of the financial sector from the CSDDD is deeply concerning. The accepted approach under the UN guiding principles and OECD guidelines was for businesses to do due diligence on their full value chains, including downstream. The CSDDD deviated from that and created a new concept of chain of activities and effectively removed financial services from that. We are very worried about this. Along with ActionAid Ireland, we recently published research on financial flows toward fossil fuels in Ireland, revealing a figure of €32 billion invested in fossil fuels as of June 2024 through companies based in Ireland. All of that is outside the scope of the CSDDD as it stands.

We gave another case of our work in Honduras with the Agua Zarca Dam, which was associated with the assassination of Berta Cáceres, the human rights defender. The finance came through an arm of the World Bank and a couple of EU development banks. Berta Cáceres' daughter came to the EU to lobby for the inclusion of financial services in that so these sorts of tragedies do not occur again but it did not happen. It was not included. In the CSDDD, there is the possibility for that exclusion to be reviewed in two years but the omnibus would remove that and lock that in. That is something we would really like to see included.