Recital 45

(45) Under the due diligence obligations provided for in this Directive, if a company identifies potential adverse human rights or environmental impacts, it should take appropriate measures to prevent or adequately mitigate them. To provide companies with legal clarity and certainty, this Directive should set out the actions companies should be expected to take for prevention and mitigation of potential adverse impacts, where relevant depending on the circumstances. When assessing the appropriate measures to prevent or adequately mitigate adverse impacts, due account should be taken of the so-called ‘level of involvement of the company in an adverse impact’ in line with the international frameworks and the company’s ability to influence the business partner causing or jointly causing the adverse impact. Companies should take appropriate measures to prevent or mitigate the adverse impacts that they cause by themselves (so-called ‘causing’ the adverse impact as referred to in the international framework) or jointly with their subsidiaries or business partners (so-called ‘contributing’ to the adverse impact as referred to in the international framework). This applies irrespective of whether third parties outside of the company’s chain of activities are also causing the adverse impact. Jointly causing the adverse impact is not limited to equal implication of the company and its subsidiary or business partner in the adverse impact, but should cover all cases of the company’s acts or omissions, causing the adverse impact in combination with the acts or omissions of subsidiaries or business partners, including where the company substantially facilitates or incentivises a business partner to cause an adverse impact, that is, excluding minor or trivial contributions. When companies are not causing the adverse impacts occurring in their chains of activities themselves or jointly with other legal entities, but the adverse impact is caused only by their business partner in the chains of activities of the companies (so-called ‘being directly linked to’ the adverse impact, as referred to in the international framework), they should still aim to use their influence to prevent or mitigate the adverse impact caused by their business partners or to increase their influence to do so. Using only the notion of ‘causing’ the adverse impact instead of the aforementioned terms used in the international frameworks avoids confusion with existing legal terms in national legal systems while covering the same causal relationships described in those frameworks. In this context, in line with the international frameworks, the company’s influence on a business partner should include on the one hand its ability to persuade the business partner to prevent adverse impacts, (for example through market power, pre-qualification requirements or linking business incentives to human rights and environmental performance), and, on the other hand, the degree of influence or leverage that the company could reasonably exercise, for example through cooperation with the business partner in question or engagement with another company which is the direct business partner of the business partner associated with the adverse impact.

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Source: EUR-Lex CELLAR · retrieved 2026-08-27 · Text as adopted (Official Journal); later amendments are not incorporated in this text.