Introduction

For some, greater transparency of supply chains will lead to increased liability and accountability. For most, it will support more effective risk management and the ability to provide customers with a product of higher qualities, a business in line with changing societal and investor values and an enterprise removed from criminality and unlawfulness.

Those directly involved and benefitting from forced labor, trafficking, modern slavery and the underlying necessary criminal and unlawful activities run an increasing risk of being discovered. But worse still is the position of those who did not realise because they failed to conduct due diligence or were not mindful in their choice of business partners and counterparties.

There is now an active commitment by civil society to understand and identify the structure and relationships in supply chains. NGOs caring for victims are now structuring data collection better and, with collaboration, making this available to law enforcement and the banking industry. Other NGOs are using the richer open source intelligence, more proficient search tools and professional practices to develop clear transactional maps showing the supply chain arrangements that begin with abuse of humans forced to provide their labor and end with sale of consumer products.

This briefing paper sets out recent improvements to the transparency of supply chains and analysis techniques and resources being increasingly applied by civil society to identify where exploitative activities exist in a supply chain and the nature of the actors involved. The case study included focuses on a supply chain in the fishing industry, but the methodology is already being applied supply chains in other industries. The output of the analyses has been traditionally used by the antimoney laundering profession which call the output ‘typology information products’ to determine the underlying reasons for client transactions and the nature of the underlying criminality (predicate offences) that cause or drive the movement of money. However, to other industries, such as the fishing industry, these information products will be transaction maps of supply chains, showing who bought from whom and how the value chain is rooted in trafficking and modern slavery and the crimes that are necessary to force a person to work.

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