Is the EU Green Claims Directive dead or not?

A question with a checkable answer

Few pieces of pending legislation have been declared dead as often, and as confidently, as the EU's proposed Green Claims Directive. Since June 2025, much commentary — trade press, sustainability newsletters, even some legal analyses — has reported the proposal "withdrawn". The institutional record says otherwise: as of this article's verification date, the proposal has never been formally withdrawn, was listed as pending in the Commission's 2026 work programme, and sits in the European Parliament's procedure file with the status "Awaiting Council's 1st reading position" (European Parliament, n.d.; OEIL, 2026). What actually happened in June 2025 was an announced intention to withdraw, delivered by a Commission spokesperson, which triggered the collapse of trilogue negotiations — followed within days by the Commission clarifying that the proposal "has not been withdrawn" (ESG Today, 2025). The directive is not dead; it is blocked, and the difference matters for everything this theme covers.

This article reconstructs the record: what the proposal would do, the procedural history through the June 2025 rupture, the legal question of whether unilateral withdrawal is even available, and what the episode means for green-claims law with or without the directive.

What the proposal would do

The Green Claims Directive — proposed by the Commission on 22 March 2023 as COM(2023) 166 — would set "minimum requirements on the substantiation and communication of voluntary environmental claims" (COM(2023) 166), completing the architecture whose first half, the Empowering Consumers Directive, is already law (European Commission, n.d.; the self-declared-labels article). Where the 2024 directive prohibits categories of practice, the proposal regulates the process behind permitted claims: traders would have to substantiate explicit environmental claims against specified scientific requirements, and — the proposal's signature mechanism — submit them to ex ante verification. In the proposal's words, "[a]n officially accredited body (the 'verifier') will carry out this ex-ante verification of claims submitted by the company wishing to use it", issuing a certificate of conformity that "will be recognised across the EU... and will allow companies to use the claim in a commercial communication to consumers across the internal market" (COM(2023) 166). Verifiers must be "officially accredited independent bod[ies], with no conflicts of interest to ensure independence of judgment" (COM(2023) 166). The proposal would also impose governance rules on environmental labelling schemes — including a bar on new national public schemes and approval requirements for new private ones — extending the certification-gateway logic the 2024 directive began.

For packaging, the proposal's significance is direct: virtually every voluntary on-pack environmental assertion this library documents — recyclability qualifications, content percentages, footprint figures — would, as an "explicit environmental claim", pass through verification before use. The proposal is, in short, the difference between a claims regime that polices after the fact and one that licenses before it.

The procedural record, reconstructed

The proposal advanced on the ordinary legislative timetable for two years. The European Parliament adopted its first-reading position on 12 March 2024, "with 467 votes in favour, 65 against, and 74 abstentions"; the Council reached its general approach on 17 June 2024; trilogues began on 28 January 2025, with a second round on 24 April 2025 covering "claims and labels and labelling schemes, information to consumers and verification, and access to justice and penalties" (European Parliament, n.d.).

The rupture came in a single week of June 2025. On 18 June, the European People's Party wrote to Commissioner Jessika Roswall calling for withdrawal. On 20 June, at the Commission's midday briefing, spokesperson Maciej Berestecki stated: "In the current context indeed the Commission intends to withdraw the green claims proposal", citing burden on "around 30 million microenterprises, i.e. 96% of all EU companies" (Just Food, 2025; Latham & Watkins, 2025). On 23 June, the scheduled third trilogue was cancelled — the Council "decided to cancel the meeting with the Parliament in light of the Commission's announcement" (Latham & Watkins, 2025). Italy's role ran through the Council file: its changed position — withdrawing support for the proposal over the inclusion of micro-enterprises — created a blocking minority against the Council position, a move contemporaneous analysis identifies as what "ultimately led to the Commission's announcement" (CMS, 2025). Parliament's negotiators protested; the committee chairs declared themselves "ready to continue negotiations as soon as possible by resuming the inter-institutional conversations" (Latham & Watkins, 2025).

Then the reversal-of-the-reversal: on 30 June 2025, a Commission spokesperson told ESG Today the directive "has not been withdrawn", explaining that the announced intention had been conditioned on the co-legislators' treatment of micro-enterprise exemptions — a condition Parliament's negotiators insisted had already been met (ESG Today, 2025). MEPs Anna Cavazzini and Antonio Decaro warned that "[t]his modus operandi could set a dangerous precedent for the legislative process"; co-rapporteur Sandro Gozi's bafflement — "I don't understand why the Commission make this declaration" — captured the procedural disorientation on all sides (ESG Today, 2025).

The record since is one of suspended animation. The Commission's 2026 work programme, adopted 21 October 2025, lists the proposal as pending; the Council's Danish presidency attempted to restart discussions; the Parliament's Legislative Train describes the file as "Blocked", with the Council as blocking institution; and the procedure file's formal status remains "Awaiting Council's 1st reading position" (European Parliament, n.d.; Linklaters, 2025; OEIL, 2026). No withdrawal has been published in the Official Journal — the act that would actually end the procedure.

Can the Commission withdraw at all?

Beneath the politics sits a genuine constitutional question. The Commission's right of initiative includes, in general, a power to withdraw proposals — routinely exercised through annual work-programme annexes listing abandoned files. But the Court of Justice's case law constrains withdrawal once the legislative machinery is engaged: the Commission must give reasons, and — in the reading offered by legal commentators on this episode — "cannot just withdraw a legislative procedure without justification, if the Council and/or the Parliament have adopted a first-reading position, unless both institutions support the withdrawal" (Latham & Watkins, 2025). The Green Claims file sits squarely in the protected zone: Parliament adopted its first-reading position in March 2024, and negotiations had reached a third trilogue. A unilateral withdrawal against Parliament's declared willingness to negotiate would invite exactly the institutional litigation the June 2025 warnings foreshadowed — which is, plausibly, why intention never matured into act.

The episode thereby illuminates a structural fact about EU lawmaking that packaging practitioners rarely encounter: proposals do not die by press briefing. They die by formal withdrawal, publication, and the procedural acquiescence of the co-legislators — or they persist, zombie-like, awaiting a presidency with the votes and the will to revive them. The Green Claims Directive is in the second condition.

What the blockage changes — and what it does not

The practical question for this theme is what green-claims law looks like with the directive suspended, and the answer is: more like the directive's world than the commentary suggests, because the surrounding architecture kept moving.

The prohibition layer is in force regardless. The Empowering Consumers Directive's blacklist — self-declared badges, generic claims, offsetting-based neutrality claims — applies from September 2026 with no dependence on the Green Claims file (the self-declared-labels and generic-claims articles). The packaging-specific layer is in force: PPWR Article 14 conditions packaging claims from August 2026. National regimes — France's carbon-neutrality decree, the Dutch guidelines — operate independently. What the blockage removes is the verification layer: the ex ante licensing of claims, the accreditation infrastructure, the scheme-approval machinery. Enforcement remains ex post, complaint-driven, and jurisdictionally uneven — the world the enforcement article maps.

The deeper loss, on this library's reading, is informational. The proposal's verification machinery would have generated, for the first time, a systematic public record of what environmental claims are made and on what substantiation — the census this field has never had, whose absence is why prevalence estimates rest on the six-year-old sweeps examined in the prevalence article. A licensing regime is also a measurement regime; blocking the first forecloses the second.

The suspended layer in comparative perspective

What exactly is suspended becomes clearer when the proposal's verification model is set beside the substantiation architectures that did arrive, because the EU has, in effect, run a natural experiment in regulatory design across its own instruments.

Three models now coexist in various states of force. The prohibition model — the Empowering Consumers Directive's blacklist — needs no evidence assessment at all: the claim form itself is unlawful, and enforcement is a matter of observation. The documentation model — PPWR Article 14's technical-file requirement — makes substantiation a standing compliance artefact, held in conformity documentation and auditable by market surveillance without any claim-by-claim review. The verification model — the Green Claims proposal's accredited ex ante verifier, issuing certificates of conformity "recognised across the EU" (COM(2023) 166) — would have interposed an assessment between every claim and its communication. The three models price error differently: prohibition prevents defined abuses at the cost of bluntness; documentation catches unsupported claims at audit, after communication; verification catches them before communication, at the cost of an approval apparatus scaled to the entire claim economy.

The June 2025 rupture is best understood as a judgment about the third model's costs rather than about greenwashing's importance — the micro-enterprise rationale offered by the Commission's spokesperson was, in terms, an administrative-burden argument (Just Food, 2025). And the judgment has a respectable case behind it: an economy-wide licensing regime for commercial speech is an extraordinary instrument, the verifier capacity it presumes did not exist, and the models already in force cover much of the abuse the proposal targeted. The counter-case is equally serious: prohibition and documentation both operate ex post against the claims that were made, leaving untouched the selection effect the verification model uniquely addressed — claims that would never have survived an assessor's first reading are communicated freely under the surviving models until an enforcer notices.

For the certification industry, the suspension has a quieter consequence this library's third theme equips readers to see. The proposal's scheme-governance chapter would have subjected environmental labelling schemes themselves — their methodologies, their approval, their proliferation — to regulatory control, including restraints on new schemes. Its suspension leaves scheme governance to the market and to the Empowering Consumers Directive's gateway criteria alone: the EU will condition badge display on scheme quality from September 2026, but no authority will assess the schemes' substantive environmental methodologies. The certification economy thus enters its legally privileged era — badges lawful only when certified — without the oversight layer that was designed to accompany the privilege: a regulatory half-build whose stability is one of the quieter questions the blocked file leaves open.

Reading the episode

Three readings of the June 2025 rupture circulate, and the record supports elements of each. The deregulatory reading — the directive as casualty of the simplification turn in the 2024–2029 Commission's agenda — is supported by the micro-enterprise rationale and the EPP's role. The institutional reading — a Commission testing the limits of its withdrawal power and retreating when the limits held — is supported by the reversal within ten days. The tactical reading — withdrawal-as-leverage over specific trilogue points — is supported by the Commission's own conditioning of the intention on the micro-enterprise exemption. What no reading supports is the headline version: a directive killed. The file's status is precisely what the Parliament's tracker says — blocked — and blocked files in EU practice have three exits: revival under a willing presidency, formal withdrawal in a future work programme, or expiry with the parliamentary term.

For this library's purposes the verdict question is therefore reframed. The Green Claims Directive is neither dead nor pending in any active sense; it is a suspended institutional decision about whether EU green-claims law should include prior verification. The prohibitions arrived without it. The verification layer waits on politics. And every "the EU has abandoned greenwashing regulation" claim in circulation fails against both halves of that sentence — the abandonment is unexecuted, and the regulation, in its prohibition form, is already in force. Readers tracking the file forward need watch only two registers: the Official Journal, where a real withdrawal would appear, and the Council's presidency programmes, where a real revival would — everything else, on the record of June 2025, is weather. The file's next verified change, whichever register it appears in, will be recorded in this article's revision history; until then, the accurate one-line answer to the title stands: blocked, not dead.

References

ESG Today (2025) EU Commission clarifies anti-greenwashing law has not been withdrawn, 30 June. Available at: Open source (Accessed: 18 August 2026).

CMS (2025) The EU Green Claims Directive: where are we now and what's next? Available at: Open source (Accessed: 18 August 2026).

European Commission (n.d.) Green claims (policy page). Available at: Open source (Accessed: 18 August 2026).

European Commission (2023) Proposal for a Directive on substantiation and communication of explicit environmental claims (Green Claims Directive), COM(2023) 166 final, 22 March. Available at: Open source (Accessed: 18 August 2026).

European Parliament (n.d.) Legislative Train Schedule: Substantiating green claims. Available at: Open source (Accessed: 18 August 2026).

Just Food (2025) EU green claims on halt as Commission withdraws proposal, June. Available at: Open source (Accessed: 18 August 2026).

Latham & Watkins (2025) European Commission announces intention to withdraw EU Green Claims Directive proposal. Available at: Open source (Accessed: 18 August 2026).

Linklaters (2025) EU sustainability initiatives in the Commission 2026 Work Programme. Available at: Open source (Accessed: 18 August 2026).

OEIL (2026) Procedure file 2023/0085(COD). Available at: Open source (Accessed: 18 August 2026).

Note on sources and verification

The procedural chronology rests on the European Parliament's Legislative Train page (which records the proposal date, the first-reading vote figures, the Council general approach, the trilogue dates, the "Blocked" status and the CWP 2026 listing), on the OEIL procedure file (whose status field, "Awaiting Council's 1st reading position", was retrieved directly), and on the legal analyses cited for the June 2025 sequence. The 20 June 2025 spokesperson quotation and the micro-enterprise rationale are as reported in the trade and legal coverage cited; the Commission's briefing transcript was not retrieved. The account of Italy's changed Council position and the resulting blocking minority is from the CMS analysis cited; the Council's internal voting record was not retrieved, and the causal sequencing is that analysis's characterisation. The 30 June 2025 clarification and the MEP quotations are as reported by ESG Today. The Commission Work Programme 2026 annex itself was not fetched; the pending listing rests on the Parliament's tracker and the Linklaters analysis. The proposition that unilateral withdrawal after a first-reading position requires co-legislator support is the cited firm's characterisation of the Court's case law, presented here as legal commentary rather than settled doctrine. No Official Journal withdrawal notice was found in searches conducted for this article; that is an absence claim, accurate to the verification date.

Last verified: 18 August 2026.