Complicity and Conflict Minerals: How did and could the European Union respond to its complicity in third countries in the case of the Conflict Minerals Regulation?

Abstract: For many years, the European Union has been aware that its trade with so-called “conflict minerals” has indirectly contributed to conflict and human rights abuses in third countries. In 2014, as a response to this contribution, the European Commission proposed a regulation aiming to control the products containing the minerals that enter the internal market. After three years of complex negotiations between the European Parliament and the Council of the EU the ‘Conflicts Minerals Regulation’ was agreed upon. In this thesis, a case study is conducted on the Conflict Minerals Regulation through a theoretical framework on complicity. The aim is to examine the way in which the EU is complicit to wrongdoing through its trade with conflict minerals, and whether the regulation succeeds in lessening this complicity. The analysis focuses on the way in which the EU was complicit, the compromising institutional context in which the regulation was created and finally an on-balance assessment on how the regulation helped balance the complicit act. The thesis finds that, even though the EU’s has decreased its complicity after the implementation of the regulation, the EU is still, to some extent, complicit to the principal wrongdoing. Therefore, further revision is needed to make sure that the EU can better respond to this complicity in the future.