What is the EU Forced Labour Regulation (EUFLR)?
Regulation (EU) 2024/3015 prohibits placing on the EU market, making available there or exporting any product made with forced labour. It entered into force on 13 December 2024 and applies from 14 December 2027. It is a product ban with an investigation procedure attached — not a due diligence law.
The Regulation imposes no reporting, audit or process duty on companies. What it does is give competent authorities — the Commission where the suspected forced labour is outside the EU, a Member State authority where it is inside — a procedure: a risk-based choice of what to look at, a preliminary phase in which the operator has 30 working days to answer a request for information, an investigation, and a decision within nine months that prohibits the product, orders its withdrawal and disposal, and is published so that it binds every operator placing the same product. What the operator did to know its chain is not an obligation, but Article 17 tells the authority to weigh it, and the Commission Guidelines of June 2026 say that an inability to provide traceability information counts against you. That is the whole logic: no duty to act, and everything turning on what you can show.