Highlight 22/2026: When Compliance Is Not Enough: Can Due Diligence Actually Prevent Forced Labour?

Ana Villalobos Prada, 7 July 2026

Over the past decade, human rights due diligence (HREDD) has become a cornerstone of corporate compliance. Building on the United Nations Guiding Principles of Human Rights, egislators have increasingly translated voluntary expectations into binding obligations requiring companies to identify and address human rights risks across their operations and value chains. Yet, a fundamental question remains: how is due diligence actually implemented in practice, and can it effectively prevent forced labour?

In most organisations, HREDD does not operate as a purely legal compliance function. Instead, it is frequently positioned within sustainability or ESG departments, often driven by reputational considerations, stakeholder expectations, and voluntary commitments. While this model has played an important role in mainstreaming human rights within corporate governance, it also creates structural fragmentation. Sustainability teams may develop policies, audits, and reporting mechanisms that are not fully integrated into legal compliance systems and therefore do not benefit from the same level of enforceability, oversight, or accountability.

Recent regulatory developments are beginning to challenge this separation. Instruments such as the Corporate sustainability due diligence, Corporate sustainability Reporting, the EU Forced Labour Regulation (EUFLR), together with enforcement-based regimes such as the U.S. Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA), increasingly move beyond reputational incentives and embed human rights due diligence within legal and enforcement frameworks.

However, this transition remains incomplete. While these instruments strengthen expectations, they do not fully resolve the operational question of how companies should organise their internal systems to ensure effective risk mitigation. In particular, the most stringent enforcement mechanisms, such as the rebuttable presumption under the UFLPA, which shifts the burden of proof onto companies, require a level of traceability and evidentiary control that many existing sustainability-led systems are not designed to provide.

In practice, companies often rely on a range of private governance tools,  including audits, certifications, and multistakeholder initiatives, to support the operationalisation of due diligence. These mechanisms are frequently embedded within broader sustainability strategies, and increasingly interact with corporate legal compliance and Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) systems. They can play a valuable role in improving supply chain visibility, facilitating risk identification, and supporting alignment between different actors.

However, their effectiveness ultimately depends on how they are integrated into formal compliance and control frameworks. In particular, ensuring that insights generated through these tools are translated into enforceable decisions, monitoring processes, and corrective actions remains a key challenge. In complex and multi-tier supply chains, maintaining this link between sustainability-driven approaches and legally grounded risk management systems is critical to achieving consistent and sustained risk mitigation.

This raises a broader structural question. Can effective human rights risk mitigation be achieved through sustainability-driven approaches alone, or does it require integration into formal compliance and control systems? While some argue that human rights should not be treated as a traditional compliance issue, given their ethical and context-specific nature, emerging enforcement trends suggest that legal accountability increasingly depends on demonstrable and verifiable outcomes, not only on policies and commitments.

Ultimately, the evolving regulatory landscape points towards a convergence: sustainability considerations are progressively moving into the domain of enforceable compliance. Yet significant gaps remain. Bridging these gaps will require not only stronger legal frameworks, but also a reconfiguration of internal corporate systems to ensure that due diligence is not merely performed, but capable of preventing harm in practice.

Ana Villalobos Prada, Highlight 22/2026: When Compliance Is Not Enough: Can Due Diligence Actually Prevent Forced Labour?, 7 July 2026, available at www.meig.ch

The views expressed in the MEIG Highlights are personal to the authors and neither reflect the positions of the MEIG Programme nor those of the University of Geneva