The new legislation came into force in all 27 EU states on March 3, making it an offence to trade in illegal timber and and wood products and obligating all ‘operators’, which first place timber on the EU market, to undertake due diligence illegality risk assessment of their suppliers.
"We’ve been fighting for this kind of regulation for years," said Greenpeace EU forest policy director Sebastiane Risso. "For too long EU companies have been able to trade in illegal material with impunity. Now they must ensure it stays out of their supply chains, or risk prosecution and sanctions."
Greenpeace, he added, would monitor the impact and effectiveness of the regulation over the next two years, after which its operation will be reviewed by the EU.
It would also "contribute to implementation and enforcement". Its first action in this respect, said forest campaigner Danielle van Oijem, was its new report: Cut it Out: Illegal Logging in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
"It highlights an almost total lack of adequate systems to verify legality," she said. "This means it is virtually impossible for any timber from DRC to satisfy the EUTR and we would like to know how anyone claiming they are sourcing compliant material is proving it."
Head of forest policy and trade Beatrix Richards said WWF UK did not seek the role of an "alternative EUTR police force", but wanted to help the official UK enforcement body, the National Measurement Office, be effective.
"We want to help operators and their suppliers to comply and are happy to share the experience on verifying legality of our Global Forest & Trade Network partners," she said.
A disappointment of the legislation, she added, was that it covered under 50 of the total of the EU’s 150 timber-based product import categories.
"There are some very strange anomalies and it potentially counts against EU manufacturers, if they have to comply with the EUTR for their raw material imports, while importers of finished products don’t," she said. "Over the two year review period we will be pressing for all 150 categories to be covered."
The WWF also plans to monitor that enforcement is uniform across Europe.
"Currently the UK is among the minority of countries fully prepared in terms of implementing complementary measures for enforcing the EUTR at national level," she said. "There is also wide discrepancy in terms of penalties across the EU."
