Product Exclusion as Market-Access Governance: The EU Forced Labour Regulation and Korea’s Distant-Water Fishing Supply Chain

From 14 December 2027, Regulation (EU) 2024/3015 will prohibit the Union-market placement and export of products made with forced labour, without imposing an autonomous ex ante duty to generate product-specific labour records. Drawing on Korean primary legal sources, this article provides an ex ante doctrinal assessment of the Regulation and the Commission’s 2026 Guidelines. It distinguishes provenance—documenting a product’s production and supply path—from attribution—linking a production condition to that product. First, as narrowed in 2026, the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive is less plausible as an existing alternative making an equivalent contribution under Article XX(a) of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade 1994. Second, Article 20(5) of the Regulation, by permitting withholding rather than disposal in strategic supply chains, could translate product-level differentiation into country-level discrimination; a necessity defence of disposal makes that relaxation harder to justify under the chapeau. Third, Korean fishery provenance records reach consignment level, whereas statutory and official labour-related records do not systematically do so. Missing records may therefore reflect the domestic record-generation architecture or limited operator control rather than non-cooperation, a distinction the Regulation and Guidelines do not expressly resolve. Market access may thus turn on factors external to production conditions.