Part I of the standard includes general requirements for quality management performance. Part II contains requirements for access to information and risk assessment as well as requirements to making claims about the LegalSource Program. Part III of the standard contains the requirements for addressing identified risks in the supply chain through risk mitigation.
The following points are important to understanding the draft version of the standard and related issues.
1) The LegalSource standard has been developed in order to enable companies buying wood products and material to receive third party certification of systems to manage and mitigate any risks that illegal timber enters their supply chain through implementation of due diligence systems.
2) It follows from point 1) that the standard is NOT a product certification standard, and as such does not certify the legality of all material included in the scope of a particular supply chain. The certification covers only the system implementation of the certified organisations.
3) The standard has been developed primarily with the requirements of the EU Timber Regulation in mind, but may be applied to any company that sources wood and wood products in other markets or companies that produce and export finished or semi-finished products from overseas to the EU market.
4) Forest certification and timber legality verification according to well-recognised schemes are important as tools to mitigate risk; hoewever, currently no certification or verification system are formally recognized to addresses all the risk aspects coverered by the EU Timber Regulation, including compliance with shipping and tax payment regulations throughout the supply chain. Therefore the standard is based on the premise that ALL material and sources need to undergo a risk assessment, regardless of certification/ verification status, although some key risk aspects are clearly covered. Please note that the standard is based on the current status and level of information provided by the EU. As several certification and verification schemes are working to provide full assurance under the Regulation, and as EU may at some point clarify the status of the various schemes under the Regulation, this is naturally a point that may change in the future. The standard will be amended to reflect any such changes.
