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The Netherlands’ Child Labor Due Diligence Act puts a legal duty on companies to make sure their supply chains are free from child labour. It aims to stop goods and services produced with child labour from entering the Dutch market, but raises questions about children’s civil rights, enforcement, competition, and how far corporate responsibility really goes. A deeper dive for those who want more detail is linked here.
Around the world today, some of the worst child abuse and exploitation on the planet is still embedded in global supply chains that feed comfortable lives in wealthy countries. Children as young as 5–7 work long days in cocoa farms in West Africa so global chocolate brands can keep prices low, even after decades of “zero child labour” promises. Children crawl into narrow, dangerous tunnels to dig cobalt and other minerals in Central Africa that power electronic gadgets and electric vehicles, despite years of reporting that major tech and auto companies continue to buy from suppliers tied to these abuses. In South Asia and Latin America, children sew clothes in sweatshops or pick crops in hazardous conditions, so fast‑fashion brands and agribusiness can offer ultra‑cheap products while governments and corporate buyers often look the other way.
In all of these cases, corporations benefit from lower costs and higher margins, while producer‑country governments frequently lack the will or capacity to enforce labour laws, and consumer‑country governments rely mostly on weak, voluntary standards and limited import bans. The Netherlands’ Child Labour Due Diligence Act—and its move toward broader mandatory due diligence—points to a different model: one where companies are legally required to investigate child‑labour risks, publicly declare their efforts, and face fines or even criminal consequences if they fail to act. If more countries followed this approach with real enforcement, it would become much harder for corporations and governments to profit from extreme child abuse in global supply chains, and easier for advocates to push for real change for the children trapped in these conditions today.
- What the new Netherland’s law is trying to do
- What the new Netherland’s law is trying to do
- The Act’s goal is to prevent people in the Netherlands from buying goods and services made with child labour, building on existing standards like the OECD Guidelines and the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
- The government argues that both companies and the state have a duty to protect children from exploitation and to stop firms gaining an unfair price advantage by using child labour.
- Who is responsible and what is required
- “Responsible persons” include both natural persons (e.g., directors) and legal persons (companies), with responsibility assigned to the legal entity under whose authority supplies are made, even in complex multinational groups. This is meant to prevent parent companies from hiding behind under‑funded subsidiaries.
- Companies that systematically supply goods or services to Dutch users must file a declaration that they have done due diligence to prevent child labour in their supply chains. This is formally a one‑time declaration, but the government expects continuous compliance.
- Due diligence means investigating where there is a reasonable suspicion of child labour, creating an action plan to address it, consulting with civil society, and taking steps to ensure goods and services are no longer produced with child labour—even if the business relationship continues.
- Enforcement: fines and criminal penalties
- Authorities can impose administrative fines when companies fail to meet their due diligence obligations; these fines are calibrated to the seriousness of the violation and do not require proof that the company knowingly broke the law.
- In serious cases, a controller of a company can face criminal penalties, including up to six months’ imprisonment. Civil and criminal tools are meant to complement each other: civil law for faster, preventive oversight; criminal law for the most serious misconduct.
- Criticisms and broader EU context
- Dutch parliamentary committees and critics worry about extra administrative burdens on businesses, distortion of competition, and whether the Act adds much beyond existing soft‑law standards. They also question how realistic enforcement is, given the difficulty of tracing child labour in global supply chains.
- At EU level, the new Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (EU 2024/1760) will require companies across member states to identify, prevent, and address human rights harms, including child labour, with national laws due by 2027. The Netherlands is already moving toward a broader Responsible and Sustainable International Business Act that would replace the Child Labour Due Diligence Act and extend due diligence to wider human‑rights and environmental impacts.
- Example: Tony’s Chocolonely and the cocoa sector
- Tony’s Chocolonely, a Dutch chocolate company, promotes a model of 100% traceable cocoa and implements a Child Labour Monitoring and Remediation System across its supply chain, identifying over 1,000 child labour cases among more than 31,000 children in its sourcing communities and reporting a lower child labour rate than the industry average.
- Critics, including Slave Free Chocolate and advocacy reports on West African cocoa, argue that Tony’s association with major processors accused of child labour and the overall rise in child labour in the cocoa sector show that strong branding and traceability claims may not translate into real industry‑wide change.
- The example highlights both the value and the limits of due diligence laws: they can push companies to trace and respond to child labour, but they do not guarantee that supply chains are free from exploitation or that structural problems in producing countries are resolved.
Sources:
- Dutch Child Labour Due Diligence Act and Dutch due‑diligence debates (summary in your memo): https://www.government.nl/topics/corporate-social-responsibility
- EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive overview: https://commission.europa.eu/business-economy-euro/doing-business-eu/corporate-sustainability-due-diligence_en
- U.S. Tariff Act forced‑labour import ban (general background): https://www.cbp.gov/trade/forced-labor
- Child labour in West African cocoa and global chocolate supply chains (example overview): https://www.ilo.org/global/topics/child-labour/lang–en/index.htm
On paper, both the United States and the Netherlands prohibit the worst forms of child labor, but in practice the Netherlands has moved further toward making companies legally responsible for abuse in their global supply chains, while the U.S. focuses more on domestic workplace rules and targeted import bans.
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In the U.S., federal child labor rules under the Fair Labor Standards Act set minimum ages, limit hours, and ban hazardous work for minors, with civil money penalties that can now exceed $15,000 per violation and higher penalties when a child is seriously harmed or killed. (https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/WHD/child-labor/child-labor-report-congress_2023-2024.pdf)(https://www.callaborlaw.com/blog/us-department-of-labor-releases-new-guidance-for-child-labor-law-penalty-assessment)(https://www.nist.gov/blogs/manufacturing-innovation-blog/understanding-federal-and-state-child-labor-laws) In theory, this framework is strong, but enforcement data show an 88% increase in federal child labor violations over the last five years and nearly 5,800 children found working in violation of federal law in FY 2023, even as several U.S. states have recently weakened protections by expanding hours or permitted jobs for teens. (https://www.wagehourlitigation.com/2024/01/child-labor-law-penalties-on-the-rise-employers-fact-various-avenues-to-increased-expense/)(https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/data)(https://www.epi.org/blog/child-labor-remains-a-key-state-legislative-issue-in-2024-state-lawmakers-must-seize-opportunities-to-stop-the-rollback-of-child-labor-protections/)[1]
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The Netherlands also bans the worst forms of child labour domestically and reports no confirmed cases of those worst forms within its borders in recent human‑rights reviews. (https://www.state.gov/reports/2024-country-reports-on-human-rights-practices/netherlands) What makes it distinctive is the Child Labour Due Diligence Act, which requires any company supplying goods or services to Dutch end‑users—regardless of where they are based—to investigate whether there is a reasonable suspicion of child labour in their supply chains, take action to prevent it, and file a due‑diligence declaration, with fines that can reach up to 10% of global turnover and potential criminal liability for repeat offenders. (https://www.aoshearman.com/en/insights/mandatory-human-rights-due-diligence-laws-the-netherlands-led-the-way-in-addressing-child)(https://www.jtl.columbia.edu/bulletin-blog/the-netherlands-steps-up-efforts-to-eliminate-child-labor)(https://www.qima.com/whitepaper/netherlands-child-labor)[7]
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In theory, both systems say children should not be exploited; in practice, the U.S. model is centered on policing how minors work inside U.S. borders and stopping some abusive imports, while the Dutch model adds an explicit, enforceable duty of care over global supply chains, treating child labour anywhere in the chain as a corporate responsibility problem, not just a foreign governance issue. (https://www.jtl.columbia.edu/bulletin-blog/the-netherlands-steps-up-efforts-to-eliminate-child-labor)(https://www.akingump.com/en/insights/alerts/supply-chain-due-diligence-laws-go-orange-netherlands-latest-to)(https://aublr.org/2020/05/why-the-worlds-largest-chocolate-port-is-fighting-child-labor/)[8]
Research for this article provided by Eshanee Singh
For further reading about International Child Abuse & Child Protection Read More Here.
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