Witnesses Say Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act Passage Vital
The U.S Commission on International Religious Freedom, an advisory committee to Congress, heard from four witnesses that passing the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act is the most important thing the U.S. could do to convince companies that sell in the U.S. to exit China's Xinjiang region. One witness, from the Heritage Foundation, said a better first step would be a two-year region-wide withhold release order, which would give CBP time to gather more convincing evidence about the scope of forced labor in the western Chinese province.
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Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., sent a statement to the hearing that said should businesses “choose to continue doing business where they know they may be complicit … we must call it out and make sure they do not make unknowing customers complicit.”
Louisa Greve, director of global advocacy at the Uyghur Human Rights Project, told the commission on March 10 that “we do have evidence now that international pressure is starting to have an impact.” She said one of the textile companies in China most involved with forced labor in Xinjiang made a stock filing that said it had a $55 million loss in 2020, and that multiple American brands had canceled orders. She said Canada and Australia are considering forced labor legislation, and the Netherlands is about to. “I do believe that a tipping point is in reach,” she said.
Olivia Enos, a senior policy analyst at the Asian Studies Center of the Heritage Foundation, said she supports a rebuttable presumption for factories adjacent to re-education camps and for companies that participate in labor transfer schemes, but said it's not clear that all work in Xinjiang is forced labor. She said resources should be added to CBP's forced labor division, so they can do investigations and quarterly reports on what they're finding out about Xinjiang.
Scott Nova, executive director of the Worker Rights Consortium, disagreed, saying that the prevention act is fair. He said the only way companies can ensure no forced labor is in their supply chains is to make sure there is no production in or procurement from Xinjiang.
Sophie Richardson, China director at Human Rights Watch, said the burden of proof has to be shifted to companies, because now, it's so hard to prove there is forced labor because workers are not free to talk to auditors. “I think there’s still a huge amount of denial, and an effort to shift the blame, or say there really isn’t a problem, or you don’t have specific evidence about my supply chain and therefore there isn’t a problem here.”
But even past getting the bill into law, Nova said, the most important thing the Biden administration could do is enforce the region-wide WROs it has on cotton and tomatoes from Xinjiang (see 2102120045). He said that the administration should “ensure that the region-wide WRO is enforced energetically, aggressively and effectively, and there’s mixed signals right now coming from CBP on that front.”