A few weeks after the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted businesses’ supply chains around the world, EU Justice Commissioner Didier Reynders announced that the EU’s executive body wanted to introduce an ambitious new corporate due diligence bill.

The new rules, he explained, would be modeled after the UN’s guiding principles on business and human rights and would require large EU-based companies to ensure that human rights and environmental issues are respected throughout their supply chains.