Rubber-stamping Repression. How EU governments and a global green label made European furniture buyers complicit in torture, 25 November 2022

For years, Earthsight can reveal, Europe’s largest furniture retail chains have been profiting from the torture of political prisoners in Belarus, while their purchases have also served to personally enrich the country’s brutal dictator, Alexander Lukashenko, at the expense of some of Europe’s last primal forests...Self-interested European governments refused for years to implement the sanctions which could end the scandalous trade, and are now even breaking their own laws in allowing it to continue.

Earthsight has connected the use of forced prison labour to furniture sold at almost every major furniture retail chain in Europe, including IKEA, leading French furniture retail chain BUT, and Austrian-headquartered furniture group XXXLutz, the second largest furniture retailer on the continent. IKEA furniture linked to the scandal has also been sold in the USA...

Earthsight interviewed past and current political prisoners at some of the penal colonies where wood processing takes place. They testified to torture and maltreatment of political prisoners, to the compulsory nature of the work in the woodshops, and the terrible working conditions...

XXXLutz told Earthsight that its purchasing and that of its subsidiaries Poco and BUT is carried out through a third party, German company GIGA International, and referred us to them for a response. GIGA stated that it had terminated all cooperation with direct suppliers in Belarus in February 2022. They stated that they had asked their (indirect) suppliers Polipol and Bega for a detailed statement. GIGA stated that it “obliges all suppliers to observe all valid regulations and laws” and that this forms a “central component of supplier contracts”. It stated that its own and third party audits of its supply chains in Belarus in 2021 had “found no irregularities”, including in relation to human rights. IKEA said it had no comment. Bega Gruppe, Roller and Porta Mobel/Mobel Boss did not respond to requests for comment. Neither did Ivatsevichdrev or FanDOK...