Know Your Supply Chain: Proposal For EU-wide Mandatory Due Diligence Legislation

Introduction

Supply chains have been in focus throughout 2020, and not only thanks to COVID-19. Earlier this year, the European Commissioner for Justice, Didier Reynders, announced that in 2021 the Commission would propose legislation on mandatory corporate due diligence covering human rights and environmental risks across a business's supply chain. The discussion around the introduction of a new (harmonised) aspect of corporate accountability comes at a time when certain Member States, including France and the Netherlands, have already adopted their own (national) legislation on mandatory human rights due diligence in recent years.   

More recently, in September 2020 the European Parliament's Committee on Legal Affairs published a report together with a proposal for the adoption of a Directive on corporate due diligence and corporate accountability. This newsletter briefly summarises the key features of this far-reaching draft directive (available here).