Various environmental and human rights organizations are concerned about a possible weakening of the supply chain law in Germany. The tenor is that the successes of recent years would have been questionable without the law.
The federal government is currently discussing an amendment to the German Supply Chain Act (LkSG) and had proposed weakening it as part of the reform, for example by eliminating certain reporting obligations and reducing the obligation to impose sanctions. However, 17 business and industrial associations, including the HDE, still see this as too much bureaucracy and burden for companies and are even calling for the law to be suspended.
NGOs, trade unions and human rights initiatives are now warning against weakening the protection of human rights and the environment. In a new report, the two human rights organizations Germanwatch and Misereor show how the LkSG, which has been in force since 2023, works in practice and is used by people worldwide to defend their rights.
The law is already being used successfully
Based on information from more than 20 experts from unions, associations, companies and civil society organizations, they use concrete examples to show that the Supply Chain Act works to protect human rights. “People and companies around the world are already successfully using the supply chain law to take action against human rights violations,” says Finn Schufft, study author and corporate responsibility consultant at Germanwatch.
In Germany, the LkSG helped to take action against unpaid wages of truck drivers. In West Africa, German companies have, for the first time, begun to work with local partners to take measures to combat the highly problematic environmental consequences of bauxite mining. The law is also helping in the textile country of Turkey: “Our member unions in Turkey have already used the law to successfully take action against anti-union actions by German companies in numerous cases and have thus been able to achieve better working conditions in collective bargaining,” says Alke Boessiger, deputy general secretary at the global trade union federation UNI Global.
Recent proposals to weaken the supply chain law could jeopardize many of the successes described. “With the amendment to the LkSG, the federal government wants to remove sanctions in the event that companies do not analyze their human rights risks and the effectiveness of their countermeasures. The preventive effect of the law would be massively weakened – and human rights violations would become more likely,” warns Armin Paasch, responsible business manager at Misereor.
