On 25 June 2026, the Paris Judicial Court became the first court to rule on the merits of Notre Affaire à Tous and others v. TotalEnergies SE – six years after the case was filed and three procedural rulings deep. At its core, the case concerns whether TotalEnergies violated the French Commercial Code by failing to adequately report the climate risks associated with its activities and take action to mitigate those risks in line with the goals of the Paris Agreement. The decision does not order TotalEnergies to stop drilling, adopt the IEA’s Net Zero Emissions pathway, or reduce its hydrocarbon production by any particular percentage. Instead, the court settled the statutory foundations of corporate climate due diligence under French law, extended those foundations to Scope 3 emissions, and set in motion a structured second round in which the real substantive contest will be fought. The ruling is less a final answer than an architecture – and understanding that architecture matters well beyond France.

Three Holdings That Change the Landscape

The loi de vigilance of 27 March 2017 (Law No. 2017-399) requires companies above certain size thresholds to draw up, publish, and effectively implement a vigilance plan containing reasonable due diligence measures to prevent serious infringements of human rights, individual health and safety, and the environment arising from their activities and those of their subsidiaries, subcontractors, and suppliers. TotalEnergies had argued, consistently and at every procedural stage, that climate change is a global, multi-factorial phenomenon that does not “result from” its activities within the meaning of the statute, and that in any event Scope 3 emissions – those arising from customers’ combustion of the fuels it produces – are beyond its control and outside the law’s scope.

The court rejected both arguments, and in doing so made three holdings of lasting significance.

First, it held that “environment” in Article L.225-102-1 of the Code de commerce must be interpreted in its broadest sense, encompassing climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere. The court anchored this reading in the statute’s legislative history – which explicitly invoked COP21 and the Paris Agreement – and in the 2023 OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises, which expressly include climate change among the negative environmental impacts that trigger due diligence obligations. The Omnibus Directive’s ongoing rollback of the CS3D’s climate transition plan requirement does not disturb this conclusion: that instrument operates at the European reporting and due diligence level, while the 2017 statute implements the underlying OECD framework as a matter of French law (§ 146). In doing so, the court has insulated the loi de vigilance from regulatory backsliding at the EU level.

Second, it held that Scope 3 emissions result from TotalEnergies’ activities within the meaning of the statute. The causal reasoning is direct: oil and gas extracted and placed on the market will, inevitably and regardless of where and when, be combusted. The emissions from that combustion are therefore not the autonomous act of a third party but the foreseeable and quantifiable consequence of the upstream production decision. The court drew on converging foreign authority – the UK Supreme Court in R (Finch) v Surrey County Council [2024] UKSC 20, the Hague Court of Appeal in Shell (12 November 2024), and the European Court of Human Rights in Greenpeace Nordic v. Norway (28 October 2025) – each of which had recognized the same strong causal link between extraction and combustion. The finding that Scope 3 belongs inside the vigilance plan is the decision’s most consequential holding.

Third, the court held that it cannot order TotalEnergies to adopt specific mitigation measures – not the IPCC’s P1 pathway, not the IEA’s NZE scenario, not any particular production reduction target. The loi de vigilance creates an obligation of means, not of result. The legislature deliberately left the content of “reasonable measures” to the company, subject to judicial review of whether those measures are adequate given the identified risks. A court that prescribed the trajectory would be substituting its judgment for the company’s on a question of energy strategy and industrial policy – a substitution the statute neither requires nor permits. The restraint is consistent with the framework’s self-regulatory design, and with the separation of powers objection that TotalEnergies itself had raised.

The Transnational Reach

The loi de vigilance’s scope extends to subsidiaries, subcontractors, and suppliers wherever they are located. The Scope 3 holding amplifies this dramatically. TotalEnergies must now map, within its vigilance plan, the combustion emissions arising from products sold by subsidiaries operating across more than 120 countries. Done honestly, that exercise produces a global emissions inventory organized by operational jurisdiction. The legal consequence is that a French statute – applied by a French court, in proceedings brought by French civil society – now governs how one of the world’s largest energy groups accounts for climate impacts generated in Angola, Iraq, the United States, Brazil, and dozens of other states.

This is a Brussels Effect dynamic, but operating through litigation rather than regulation. The CS3D will not apply to in-scope companies until July 2029, and the CSRD, while already operative for the largest EU-based Wave 1 reporters, does not reach non-EU parent companies until 2029 at the earliest. The loi de vigilance, by contrast, is already operative and enforceable through litigation, as this judgment confirms. More structurally, it imposes obligations on the French parent company in respect of its subsidiaries’ global activities, without requiring those subsidiaries to be independently in scope of any regulatory regime. For companies with supply chains or subsidiaries connected to French multinationals, the practical pressure to align with the plan’s requirements, however those requirements are ultimately defined, will be felt across jurisdictions. The decision did not address the sovereignty implications of this reach, and probably could not within its proper remit. That question is now one for scholars, trade lawyers, and regulators to work through.

Provisional Enforcement and What Comes Next

The court ordered provisional enforcement of its judgment, on the basis that the prevention of climate-related risks is a matter of undisputed urgency (§ 257). TotalEnergies has six months from service of the decision to supplement its vigilance plan. The supplemented plan must include Scope 3 emissions in the risk mapping and in the associated measures. The case is then referred back to the pre-trial judge on 21 January 2027, at which point the court will examine whether the plan complies.

Provisional enforcement means the obligation runs even if TotalEnergies appeals – which seems near-certain. The appellate court could grant a stay, but the climate urgency framing makes that legally and politically awkward. More important is what the six-month window actually demands.

On the legal side, TotalEnergies must make methodological choices the court deliberately left open: which GHG Protocol categories to use, how to handle double-counting across jurisdictions, how to treat asset disposals in light of carbon lock-in risk, and which IPCC scenarios anchor the severity assessment. The court did not prescribe any of this. The quality of those choices will determine the entire second round.

On the science side, a credible Scope 3 mapping requires TotalEnergies to quantify emissions that, in 2024, it reported at 342 MtCO₂ – roughly ten times its Scope 1 and 2 combined footprint (§ 167). Once those emissions are inside the plan, the company must also publish “appropriate measures to mitigate risks or prevent serious harm” in respect of them. The measures need not follow any externally mandated trajectory, but they cannot be cosmetic. What constitutes reasonable mitigation of a 342 MtCO₂ Scope 3 risk, in a company whose business model is built on growing hydrocarbon production, is the question the January 2027 hearing will have to answer.

That is the architecture. The court has built the room and fixed the dimensions. The substantive contest – whether TotalEnergies’ chosen measures are adequate, and what happens if they are not – has been deferred, not avoided. The Article 1252 Code civil claim, which could in principle support broader injunctive relief, has been stayed pending the outcome of that second round. The financial pressure is modest for now: €20,000 in Article 700 costs per claimant, no penalty payment.

Why This Matters Beyond France

The decision is significant not because it orders TotalEnergies to do something dramatic, but because it demonstrates that a domestic due diligence statute, interpreted through the lens of international scientific and normative consensus, can reach the full climate footprint of a global energy major. The statutory foundations – environment includes climate, Scope 3 results from company activities – are now established in French law. Other jurisdictions with comparable duty-of-care or due diligence frameworks, from Germany’s Lieferkettensorgfaltspflichtengesetz to any future transposition of the CS3D, will be watching how the second round unfolds.

If the architecture works – if the January 2027 hearing produces a meaningful assessment of whether TotalEnergies’ measures are adequate –, the model becomes replicable. If it does not, the decision will stand as an important but ultimately inconclusive milestone. The six months between now and the filing of the supplemented plan are, in that sense, the most consequential period of the entire litigation.

The paragraph beginning “This is a Brussels Effect dynamic…” was slightly expanded after initial publication to include the scope of CS3D and CSRD.

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