Designers and architects must start prioritising human rights in their work. Upcoming human-rights due diligence laws mean that European companies will finally be held accountable for human-rights violations along the supply chain. This will directly link our design decisions to the dignity and welfare of workers along distribution channels worldwide and revolutionise how we design products and buildings. Germany's new act on corporate due diligence to prevent human-rights violations in the supply chain came into effect on 1 January 2023 and is closely followed by a similar EU directive expected to come into effect around 2025. European companies will finally be held accountable for human-rights violations along the supply chain. Intellectual-property laws that enable companies to withhold information about their supply chains in the interest of commercial competitiveness currently make it difficult to trace materials back to the source. The new supply chain law from Germany and soon the EU will require large companies to publish information about sustainability and human-rights due diligence – meaning that for the first time, the sources of the materials in products and buildings will become public knowledge. Monitoring mechanisms can help designers choose their source companies, but on their own are not enough. Internal monitoring usually serves to raise brand awareness, not to highlight a brand's lack of human-rights protection. Meanwhile, one of the independent Corporate Human Rights Benchmark's leading iron-ore mining companies recently committed human-rights violations by destroying an indigenous site tens of thousands of years old..The question is why human-rights violations occur in the supply chain in the first place. We can trace it back to the logic of extractivism, which is a continuation of the colonial logic of extraction and exploitation of resources – including labour and raw materials – for the benefit of specific economic goals. Examples of human-rights violations present in the extractivist logic of the supply chain include forced displacement, modern slavery, child labour, and death.  Today, more than half of the world's 100 largest economies are not states, but corporations. And because international human-rights laws, treaties and standards have so far been a contract to hold states accountable for their actions, corporations have so far been immune to international human-rights standards.  Today, more than half of the world's 100 largest economies are not states, but corporations. And because international human-rights laws, treaties and standards have so far been a contract to hold states accountable for their actions, corporations have so far been immune to international human-rights standards. It is thanks to extractivist logic that steel companies are among the largest corporations and economies in the world. Today's version of extractivist logic can be partly traced back to the 1990s, when a whole swarm of free-trade agreements emerged under the umbrella of the World Trade Organisation. The mechanisms created are still used today by corporations to legally and completely undermine and disregard all codified and substantive anti-discriminatory international human-rights treaties and laws. Of particular interest is the Investor-State Dispute Settlement mechanism (ISDS). The ISDS mechanism essentially gives corporations the ability to challenge through legal action any new national policies of host countries – including domestic labour laws mandating decent working conditions or environmental regulations limiting air and water pollution – if they could reduce the corporation's expected profits.         https://www.dezeen.com/2023/10/11/human-rights-talia-radford-opinion/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%20Dezeen&utm_content=Daily%20Dezeen+CID_