As an organisation that has been supportive of the move to introduce EU-wide due diligence measures since the onset, amfori welcomes this important step towards creating harmonised rules and a level playing field on due diligence.

International standards on due diligence such as the UNGPs and the OECD MNE Guidelines have received the support of governments, businesses and civil society organisations alike. As such, their authoritativeness is undisputed. We therefore support an EU Directive where the due diligence duty is as closely aligned as possible with those frameworks. We commend Members of the EP JURI Committee for their hard work to bring the text of the proposed Directive in closer alignment with international standards on due diligence, particularly with regard to the notion of risk-based due diligence informed by prioritisation.

For the Directive to meet its objectives, it is important that businesses are not confronted with differing expectations depending on the markets they operate in. We therefore welcome provisions to drive harmonisation across the EU-27 Member States and with it legal certainty. We encourage EU co-legislators to work to ensure that the Directive will lead to a real level-playing field once implemented nationally.

We were pleased to see an acknowledgement of the role that industry collaborative initiatives can play to support companies with their due diligence. While those initiatives are never meant to replace a company’s due diligence, they can facilitate peer learning, build capacity, gather data and offer efficiencies. We look forward to engaging with EU co-legislators on the drafting of the proposed fitness criteria.

Effective work on addressing human rights and environmental harms requires a broad suite of policy instruments that goes beyond mandatory due diligence legislation. We encourage the EU Institutions to ensure that the package of accompanying measures is as comprehensive as possible and that it covers, amongst others, effective dialogue with sourcing countries on law enforcement, capacity building programmes to boost producers’ preparedness, support mechanisms for EU SMEs, and public-private partnerships for impactful projects on the ground.

As the EU Institutions move through the final and most critical stages of the legislative deliberations for this important Directive, amfori remains committed to proactively engage to further improve the text and to provide support as needed.