# OECD Due Diligence Guidance Adopted as an OECD Council Recommendation on **25 May 2011**, this is the piece of soft law that became the operative content of hard law nearly everywhere — the SEC rule, the EU Conflict Minerals Regulation, Chinese industry guidelines, and Congolese and Rwandan domestic law all incorporate it by reference. ## The five steps 1. Establish strong company management systems 2. Identify and assess risks in the supply chain 3. Design and implement a strategy to respond to identified risks 4. **Carry out independent third-party audit at identified points in the supply chain** 5. Report annually on supply-chain due diligence Step 4 is the design insight. Because ore from many mines is aggregated and smelted into metal that is chemically indistinguishable by origin, provenance cannot be recovered downstream. The Guidance therefore targets **smelters and refiners** — the chokepoint where many mines' output converges and where an audit can still mean something. Every compliance regime since has rested on that chokepoint, which is also why the credibility of the schemes that audit it ([[ITSCI]], the Responsible Minerals Initiative) determines whether any of it works. Annex II lists the risks a company must respond to: torture, forced and child labour, war crimes, sexual violence, support to non-state armed groups, abuses by public or private security forces, bribery, fraudulent misrepresentation of origin, money laundering, and non-payment of taxes and royalties. It was developed with the eleven states of the International Conference on the Great Lakes Region and endorsed by the UN Group of Experts — a detail worth keeping when the framework is characterised as something imposed on Africa from Paris. ## The generalisation, and the retreat The minerals model was eventually extended to all value chains through the EU's **Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive**. Then it was rolled back. The **Omnibus I** package passed the European Parliament on 16 December 2025 — notably **with far-right backing**, an unprecedented alliance on this file — received final member-state approval on 24 February 2026 and entered into force on 18 March 2026. It cut the directive's scope by roughly **70%**, limiting it to companies with over 5,000 employees and €1.5 billion turnover, and **deleted the harmonised EU civil liability norm** giving victims a right to remedy, along with mandatory climate transition plans. The risk-based full-supply-chain approach survived — the one thing conflict-minerals advocates most needed to keep. The European Coalition for Corporate Justice: "Under the banner of cutting 'red tape', vital protections have been dismantled." The EU **Conflict Minerals Regulation** (2017/821) itself remains in force, applicable since January 2021, covering EU importers of 3TG globally rather than DRC-specifically — and imposing no binding obligations on downstream manufacturers at all, its single biggest structural difference from Dodd-Frank. Its Article 17(2) review was in procurement as of mid-2026, not concluded. ## Why this page matters to the vault The OECD Guidance is where the technical architecture of supply-chain human-rights regulation was actually written, and the CSDDD rollback is the clearest single datapoint that the agenda is in retreat across both major jurisdictions simultaneously — the EU narrowing its directive in the same months the US House moved to repeal [[Dodd-Frank Section 1502]]. ## See also [[Dodd-Frank Section 1502]] · [[Kimberley Process Certification Scheme]] · [[ITSCI]] · [[Conflict Minerals Hub]]