Joint Letter: Red lines to the Regulation on “prohibiting products made with forced labour on the Union market” (COM(2022) 453)

As the negotiations on the content of the legislation advance, and in order to ensure that the European Commission proposal fulfils its best potential, we, the undersigned Civil Society Organisations, Coalitions and Trade Unions, believe that the below elements are essential to make the proposed regulation efficient, implementable and above all, impactful to address forced labour meaningfully.

Thus, we consider the elements below as fundamental:

- The inclusion of remedies for all workers (both EU and non-EU based) trapped in forced labour must be a crucial point of the legislation. The provision of remedy – including compensation and back wages – should be a prerequisite to the lifting of a ban in particular (Art 6.6). These remedies should be defined through meaningful stakeholder engagement and ideally include the victims themselves when and wherever possible.

- All complainants should be protected, whether or not they are based in the EU and thus under the scope of the Whistleblower directive. This implies that all complainant’s information should be treated as confidential (Art. 10.3 and Art. 25).

- To be implementable, the proposed legislation should foresee appropriate lower evidentiary standards to initiate the investigation and to adopt a decision. The available sanctions should, similarly, be adapted as appropriate. For example, the US Customs and Border Protection authorities use “reasonable but not conclusive” as the evidentiary standard to issue a “Withhold Release Order” that allows the re-exportation of goods subject to the order, but uses the “conclusive evidence, i.e., probable cause that the goods were made with forced labour” to issue a final decision (called “forced labour finding”) which then allows authorities to seize the goods, as currently foreseen in the European Commission proposal.