EU Simplification Drive Risks Gutting Due Diligence, Warns Anti-Slavery International

The EU's simplification agenda has shrunk the number of companies required to run human rights due diligence — and Anti-Slavery International says that cut will cost more than it saves. In an op-ed, Ben Vanpeperstraete, senior EU adviser at the world's oldest human rights organization, argues the bloc has "dramatically reduced the number of companies that need to comply" while branding the move as red-tape reduction.

His argument lands squarely on the sourcing and compliance desks of apparel and footwear suppliers to EU buyers. If you sell into Europe, the question is no longer whether your customer must audit your factory — it's which customers still fall inside the thinned-out rulebook.

What does Vanpeperstraete actually claim?

His core point is accounting, not ideology. The visible costs of due diligence are concentrated and immediate: a sustainability team on payroll, consultant fees, supplier assessments, grievance procedures, worker consultations and data management. The benefits are dispersed across departments and arrive later.

The op-ed lists where those dispersed benefits show up:

• Procurement gains a more resilient supplier base
• Legal avoids litigation, or at least reduces its risk
• Central operations dodge disruption
• Investors get greater visibility and predictability
• Finance can access better pricing as sustainable finance criteria feed into investment decisions

He cites one concrete example. Dutch grid manager Stedin built a business case that an expanded corporate responsibility team would pay for itself through better interest rates, given its alignment with the EU Taxonomy — the bloc's green finance classification system.

Is the EU getting the economics backwards?

Vanpeperstraete thinks so. Because no line item ever reads "return on investment from human rights due diligence," the debate overweights the compliance budget and ignores avoided costs: forced labour bans that are "increasingly finding their way into the statute books," media exposés of supplier labour abuses, and environmental liabilities discovered before they mature. He also notes benefits no accounting department can capture, such as fewer workers in forced labour in globalised supply chains.

He draws on John Ruggie, the former UN Special Representative on business and human rights, who observed that due diligence was never meant to build "a new bureaucratic industry around human rights." The point is to embed risk identification into ordinary business decision-making.

Where does the deregulation line sit?

The op-ed concedes a legitimate ask: simple, interoperable rules, with companies not forced to duplicate information instruments across national and EU frameworks. What it rejects is the direction of travel. In Europe, Vanpeperstraete writes, "simplification became deregulation wearing a more respectable suit."

The contradiction he identifies is direct: Brussels tells companies to manage geopolitical risk, secure critical supply chains and prepare for volatility — while cutting "the very systems designed to identify those risks."

His verdict on the outcome is blunt: "That is not competitiveness. It is short-term and visionless cost-cutting." The bill, he writes, falls on workers in forced labour, communities next to polluted lakes, and companies left less prepared for an uncertain world.

For sourcing teams, the decision this forces is simple. A thinner EU rulebook doesn't thin the risk — forced labour enforcement, reputational exposure and financing conditions still price your supplier base. The question is whether you keep auditing because the law requires it, or because the exposure does.