the EU will ban products from forced labor from its common market

Thanks to a compromise obtained by European negotiators and the Member States of the Union, Europe will be able to launch investigations at any time in the event of suspicion. This particularly targets China and the exploitation of its minorities.

According to the agreement reached on Tuesday March 5, the Member States or the European Commission must launch investigations into suspected forced labor in company supply chains. In proven cases, the products concerned will be seized at the borders and withdrawn from the European market. And the agreement goes even further since fines may be imposed on companies that do not comply with European legislation. Europe, once the text is definitively validated, will join the United States, where a resolution of the same type has already been in force since 2021. This is an operation which particularly targets Chinese products and the treatment inflicted on minorities from China.

More than 27 million people worldwide, according to the ILO

This agreement is important for a scourge that affects millions of people around the world. It is difficult to know the exact number of people affected because the countries which resort to this slavery obviously do not shout it from the rooftops. There is still data that we owe, among others, to the International Labor Organization (ILO). According to this organization, it is estimated that forced labor is a reality for more than 27 million people worldwide, 12% of whom are children, or more than 3 million children.

Forced labor concerns very different areas. We can cite factory work, but there is also individual slavery resulting from immigration, forced child labor in mines, or everything that concerns the exploitation of the human body, sexual and commercial exploitation.

An agreement that particularly targets China and its minorities

In this case, the European agreement mainly concerns forced labor in factories. In the sights of the European Union: China, in particular. We think of the Uighurs and Tibetans who are deported, exploited, and who find themselves working without any rights in clothing or high-tech factories. The Apple, Zara and Siemens brands were singled out a few months ago because they worked with subcontractors employing people from forced labor, particularly in the Xinjiang region.

The objective is to fight against these methods. This comes in addition to the actions of NGOs which also work in the field and which ask not to buy products from China or suspected of having been manufactured with forced labor.