Supply Chain Mapping as Courtroom Evidence: Findings from the The ILO’s Casebook of Court Decisions on Forced Labour
The ILO’s Casebook of court decisions on forced labour shows that courts around the world increasingly treat supply chain mapping as a legal test to hold companies accountable for exploitation deep within their supplier tiers.
Risk Mapping as a Legal Requirement (Sud PTT v. La Poste)
Under France's Corporate Duty of Vigilance Law, large companies must publish a formal plan to prevent human rights violations across their operations, subsidiaries, and suppliers. In a 2023 ruling against the French postal service, La Poste, the Paris judicial court established that an actionable "risk map" is mandatory and must come first before any real preventative actions can work. The judges ruled that vague, high-level summaries are not enough: companies must map specific, real-world dangers—such as whether subcontracted delivery networks rely on undocumented, vulnerable laborers. Importantly, the court did not force the company to publicly disclose its full supplier list in order to protect business secrets.
Penalizing Blind Spots in Production (Milan Luxury Goods Decree)
Even without specific corporate-vigilance laws on the books, courts are using criminal prevention rules to penalize brands that fail to check their manufacturing lines. In 2024, the Milan Tribunal placed an Italian luxury fashion house under court oversight after finding gross negligence in its supply chain. The brand hired an intermediary supplier that had neither the staff nor the machinery to make the goods, which led to the work being passed down to unauthorized workshops that severely exploited undocumented workers. The court emphasized that having formal ethical codes means nothing if a company never verifies whether its suppliers can actually do the job legally.
Tracing Tainted Goods in Global Trade (World Uyghur Congress v. NCA)
In a 2024 UK Court of Appeal decision involving cotton sourced from the Xinjiang region, judges clarified that paying a fair market price along the way does not wash away the legal "taint" of forced labor. Under UK proceeds-of-crime laws, goods derived from forced labor remain "criminal property". This means buyers who import or handle these materials without verifying where they come from can face money-laundering investigations, making upstream supply chain mapping essential for legal compliance.
These rulings show that judges expect supply chain and risk mapping from companies with forced labor risk in their supply chains. To read the full report via the International Labour Organization visit DOI: 10.54394/00034050.
