This month’s implementation of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act – a law that requires companies to prove imports from the occupied Chinese region of East Turkistan were not produced by slaves – has triggered an outcry among companies insisting due diligence of supply chains to abide by the law is needlessly onerous, if not impossible.
Human rights advocates, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, and experts in the field of forensic testing all agree that having full knowledge of a product’s supply chain, and avoiding the use of risky products from East Turkistan like cotton is not an insurmountable burden. The technology exists, and is widely accessible, for companies to test the raw materials used in their products to ensure they do not come from East Turkistan and thus, are highly likely to have been produced via slave labor.
China is currently engaging in a genocide of the Uyghur, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and other non-Han ethnic groups in East Turkistan, which it refers to as its “Xinjiang province.” In addition to the use of concentration camps to indoctrinate and torture millions of civilians and the mass forced sterilization of women of “undesirable” ethnic backgrounds, extensive evidence compiled by human rights researchers suggests Chinese regime agents are also enslaving significant percentages of the population. Multiple studies published in the past three years indicate that the Chinese Communist Party is forcing Uyghurs and others to work picking cotton and selling Uyghur slaves to factories nationwide.
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