Since the late 1990s, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has been much debated and highlighted in the European Union. Initially, CSR was conceived by the Commission as CSR was an objective to be achieved : the question was how to incentivise companies to act beyond their legal obligations, by voluntarily contributing to the protection of the environment and to greater social cohesion. But the CSR policy of the Community was soon reduced to the facilitation of a dialogue about CSR between all relevant stakeholders. As a corollary, the representatives of the business community have come to occupy the central role in a process, from which politics essentially retreated. The predominant approach to CSR in the EU is now the so-called ‘business case’ for CSR, which argues that market forces will suffice to encourage the companies to behave responsibly, over and above their obligation to comply with their legal obligations. For the FIDH, this ‘business case’ rests on certain presuppositions about markets and the business environment, which cannot be simply assumed, but should be affirmatively created by a regulatory framework for CSR