This Week in Human Rights News

UK, US, and Canada Ban Imports on Uyghur labour in China

Sources: BBC, Al Jazeera (1, 2), Human Rights Watch (1, 2), Government of Canada, GOV.UK, Reuters

This week, the UK and Canada announced that they would help prevent British and Canadian business from being complicit in, or profiting from, human rights violations in Xinjiang, China.

The US also imposed a region-wide ban on all cotton and tomato products from China’s western Xinjiang region due to allegations that they are made with forced labour from Uyghur Muslims.
The Xinjiang region supplies nearly a quarter of the world’s cotton.

There has been mounting evidence and reports of human rights violations against Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang.
Some of the human rights violations include repressive surveillance, mass arbitrary detention, torture, forced labour, and forced sterilisations.
Thousands of children have been separated from their parents and, recent research shows, women have been forcibly subjected to methods of birth control.

It is believed that over a million people have been detained in Xinjiang in recent years.
A recent study conducted by Buzzfeed in August 2020 revealed that Xinjiang authorities built over 260 “massive” detention centers since 2017, supporting findings and reports that Chinese authorities are arbitrarily detaining Turkic Muslims en masse.
Chinese authorities say that the camps are “education” schools, fighting against terrorism and extremism.

Following global outrages after these human rights violations were brought to light, some “education” camps were closed and some detainees were “released” (yet continue to forcibly work in factories and fields in and around Xinjiang).
But many remain imprisoned simply because of who they are. Many Uyghur families do not know where their family members are.
In February 2020, an Australian think tank revealed a list of 82 global brands that sourced from factories in China that used workers from Xinjiang under conditions that “strongly suggest” forced labor.

Human rights groups such as Human Rights Watch have stated that the UK is ‘lagging behind’ in tackling forced labour in Xinjiang, and pointed out that some of the government’s measures were already taken last year.
HRW write that it was a “significant missed opportunity for the UK to go beyond the mere reporting requirements of the UK’s Modern Slavery Act 2015 and to bring in mandatory human rights due diligence legislation.”