EU announces provisional agreement on forced labour and how it may be implemented
The EU Parliament and Council have reached a provisional agreement on a new law aimed at banning goods made with forced labour, which does not name China but was initially driven by widespread allegations of state-sponsored coerced work in the Xinjiang region.
The draft agreement empowers the European Commission to launch investigations about suspected forced labour outside the bloc, and the 27 Member States are responsible for probes when there is suspicion of forced labour inside their own borders.
‘If competent authorities, while assessing the likelihood of violations of this regulation, find new information about the suspected forced labour, they must inform the competent authority of other member states, provided that the suspected forced labour is taking place in the territory of that member state. Similarly, they must inform the Commission if the suspected forced labour is occurring outside the EU,’ the Council said, 5 March.
It explained: ‘The provisional agreement clarifies that, if a part of the product which is found to be in violation of this regulation is replaceable, the order to dispose of applies only to the part concerned. For instance, if a part of a car is made with forced labour, that part will have to be disposed of, but not the whole car. The car manufacturer will have to find a new supplier for that part or make sure that it is not made with forced labour. However, if tomatoes used to make a sauce are produced using forced-labour, all the sauce will have to be disposed of.’
The EU’s initial proposal two years ago followed widespread allegations that China was using the Uyghur Muslim minority in the Xinjiang region as forced labour, an accusation denied by Beijing as ‘vicious lies’ spread by ‘anti-China forces.’
The draft EU law comes amid an intense push in the United States to toughen enforcement of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (‘UFLPA’), which came into effect in June 2022 and prohibits all goods from Xinjiang to be imported into the US, on the presumption they were made with forced labour.
The EU law will be formally adopted after it is endorsed by Member States and the EU Parliament.
