The suffering of the children remains invisible behind combustion engines, mobile phones and guitar strings. Hardly any everyday product can do without cobalt, especially if a lithium-ion battery is installed. And where most of the cobalt comes from, from the mines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, children often toil to mine the raw material, poison themselves and have no other perspective. In the mining sector and in particular in cobalt mining in the Congo, “the greatest risks to children’s rights, including the worst forms of child labour,” exist again a study of the organization Save the Children.
This is aimed at these and many other risks EU Supply Chain Law that there has recently been more controversy than was to be expected weeks ago. According to the draft directive, companies in the EU should be held responsible for child or forced labor and environmental pollution by their international suppliers. On Thursday, MEPs in the EU Parliament voted with a majority to tighten up the EU Commission’s original legislative proposal.
The requirements should already apply to EU companies with more than 250 employees and a worldwide turnover of more than 40 million euros, with transition periods of up to five years depending on the size of the company. In the original draft, these limits are 500 employees and 150 million euros. According to Parliament’s wishes, the guideline would cover the entire value chain, including all upstream and downstream production activities.
The voting result was clear
The EU states had already made up their minds at the end of last year fixed, which is far less ambitious. The so-called trilogue negotiations between Parliament, Member States and the Commission are to begin shortly. How ambitious the law will be and to what extent it will go beyond the German supply chain law that is already in force depends primarily on the majority in the Council of Ministers.
In Parliament, the voting result was quite clear with 366 yes and 225 no votes. Most recently, a group of conservative MPs, led by the CSU MP Angelika Niebler, submitted a number of amendments to weaken the parliamentary position. That was a late turn, after the EPP Group, to which the German Conservatives belong, had unanimously supported the compromise at the end of April. In the end, the members of the CDU and CSU voted against the law.
This is in the context of an overall negative attitude of the EPP. It was only on Wednesday that the parliamentary group had closed the committee negotiations on a law for the restoration of nature.
“The companies are threatened with a huge bureaucratic effort”
With the exception of one detail, which concerns the duties of managing directors, the applications were unsuccessful. In principle, the aim of the directive to better protect human rights and the environment is supported, said Niebler after the vote. But: “The companies are threatened with a huge bureaucratic effort, which threatens to overwhelm our small and medium-sized companies in particular,” said the co-chair of the CDU/CSU group in the EU Parliament.
As rapporteur in the legal committee, the Dutch social democrat Lara Wolters negotiated the compromise on the supply chain law. She was outraged by the attempts by the EPP to weaken the law in the last few meters. The EPP pursued “irresponsible policies” to destroy the hard-fought consensus that we had reached in the committee vote,” says Wolters. Instead of voting to protect people and the planet, the EPP protects “the profits of its boardroom patrons”.