We continued to fight corporate capture, and demand that the EU and the international community, through legislation, hold corporations accountable for the harm they cause around the world. A big win for us were the steps taken by the EU to exit the Energy Charter Treaty. We managed to keep the EU-Mercosur Free Trade Agreement controversial and far from being adopted.

We made good progress towards legislation to hold companies liable for their impact, with intense advocacy and campaigning for the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Legislation. Without this campaign there would have been no public-facing activities around this law.

The Energy Charter Treaty is a climate-wrecking treaty from the past, invented to protect fossil fuel interests. We have been campaigning for years for the EU and member states to leave the ECT, and 2023 brought significant results. Our campaigning contributed to the official announcements of several Member States that they were leaving the Treaty, and to the Commission proposal for a collective EU withdrawal.

The EU-CELAC summit, bringing together heads of states in Europe and Latin America was a crucial campaign moment for us. Together with our European and Latin American allies, we organised a cross-party parliamentary event, a stunt in front of the European Parliament and a civil society conference.

With the Justice is Everybody’s Business campaign we worked intensively and publicly to push EU decision makers for a strong Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD), to hold businesses accountable for the harm they cause through their supply chains. We fought back the efforts of corporate interests and regressive political influence intending to water down the directive. We mobilised the public through digital actions, and brought a giant Lady Justice statue around Europe.

 In 2023 we continued the work to end the undue fossil fuel company influence in EU decision-making within the framework of the Fossil Free Politics campaign. Highlights of the year include a petition to kick big polluters out of politics signed by over a 100,000 people, a joint declaration of 100 civil society and trade unions raising concerns about corporate capture of decision making, and for the first time ever, thanks to our advocacy work, MEPs from 4 political parties signed the call for a conflict-of-interest policy at EU level. As a result, our demands for the first into the fossil fuel industry’s responsibility at the European Parliament has been approved.

We continued to build evidence and examples of corporate human rights and environmental abuses in global value chains. We published a report on human rights due diligence failings in relation to major gas projects in Northern Mozambique.