Green Claims penalties and fines under the EU proposal

Article 17 is framed as a Member State obligation. It requires national rules on penalties for infringements of the national provisions adopted under the directive, rather than publishing a directly applicable EU schedule of fines for each type of green claim.

The penalty criteria focus on the infringement and the responsible actor: nature, gravity, extent, duration, intentional or negligent character, mitigation, financial strength, economic benefit, previous infringements, aggravating or mitigating factors, and penalties imposed elsewhere for the same cross-border infringement when that information is available through consumer-protection cooperation mechanisms.

The enforcement design distinguishes corrective action from penalties. Under Article 15, competent authorities first evaluate detected non-compliance and may require the trader, environmental labelling scheme owner, or label-displaying trader to correct the issue or stop using the non-compliant claim or label.

The Council approach makes this point explicit in the recitals: corrective action resolves the non-compliance, while a penalty is punitive. That matters for compliance planning because changing a website, relabelling a product, or withdrawing a claim may still leave penalty exposure if the infringement has already occurred.

The Commission proposal included a maximum-fine concept for coordinated consumer-protection enforcement: where fines are imposed under Article 21 of Regulation (EU) 2017/2394, the maximum amount would be at least 4% of the trader's annual turnover in the Member State or Member States concerned.

The Council general approach does not reproduce that same detailed Article 17(3) maximum-fine package in the visible compromise text. It keeps the requirement that Member States set effective, proportionate, and dissuasive penalties, and it makes the penalty criteria indicative and non-exhaustive. For public-facing guidance, the grounded position is therefore to describe the 4% turnover wording as a Commission proposal concept, not as a final EU Green Claims fine.

Penalty risk attaches to the actor responsible for the infringement under the national implementing regime. The Council text is careful about actor roles: the trader generating an explicit environmental claim is central for substantiation, environmental labelling scheme owners can be addressed for non-compliant schemes or labels, and traders displaying labels can be required to correct communication failures.

Retailers or distributors that merely replicate existing claims are treated differently from traders that generate claims, but the Council recitals also note that corrective measures may be required from retailers once misleading practices have been established under the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive framework.

A useful Green Claims penalty-readiness file should not guess fines. It should preserve the facts that Article 15 and Article 17 make relevant: the claim text, where it appeared, who generated or displayed it, substantiation status, verifier or certificate status where applicable, detected non-compliance, corrective action, mitigation, economic benefit analysis if determinable, and cross-border footprint.

That evidence helps separate three questions that are often conflated: whether the claim is non-compliant, what corrective measure is appropriate, and what penalty criteria a competent authority may consider.