US Must ‘Intensify’ Diplomacy to Fight Uyghur Forced Labor
The U.S. State Department must step up diplomatic efforts to push the United Kingdom and European Union to take a tougher stance on human rights violations linked to China’s Xinjiang region, or risk having the products of forced labor inundate overseas markets with border-control efforts that lack the robustness of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, or UFLPA, two members of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party urged Wednesday.
“While we welcome some U.S. allies and partners announcing their own import bans on forced labor products from the PRC, we remain concerned that these measures fall short of the UFLPA’s standards and are leading companies to build two separate supply chains—one ‘clean’ supply chain for the United States and another supply chain tainted by forced labor for the rest of the world,” wrote Wisconsin Republican Mike Gallagher and Illinois Democrat Raja Krishnamoorthi, the Select Committee’s chairman and ranking member, respectively, in a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken dated April 16.
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The United States has been a rare front-runner in legislating against products with a nexus to Xinjiang, mostly because China is one of the few issues that lawmakers on both sides of the aisle can agree on. Britain’s Modern Slavery Act only requires U.K. companies earning 36 million pounds ($44.8 million) or more to disclose if they’re doing anything to root out forced labor from their supply chains, not if those actions are having any effect. In 2023, the World Uyghur Congress and Global Legal Action Network made an unsuccessful legal bid to press U.K. authorities into blocking Xinjiang cotton.
The EU has made more progress, arriving at a provisional agreement last month to outlaw the products of forced labor, albeit without targeting China, since that would breach the World Trade Organization’s rules on non-discrimination. Unlike the UFLPA, which imposes a rebuttable presumption that all goods tied to Xinjiang are the product of forced labor and therefore barred from entering the United States according to Section 307 of the 1930 Tariff Act, the EU’s forced labor regulation places the burden of proof on authorities, meaning that the principle of “innocent until proven guilty” still applies.
But Gallagher and Krishnamoorthi expressed unease that even this weaker mandate could still fall apart amid reports that certain EU states are considering voting against the ban during the European Parliament’s upcoming plenary. If Europe fails to pass this legislation, they said, products made by Uyghur forced labor would not only continue to have “unfettered access” to the world’s largest single market but the risk of transshipment to the United States via EU member states would also increase.
“We therefore urge the State Department to intensify and elevate its global diplomatic efforts to address PRC state-sponsored forced labor programs and to ensure that countries around the world understand the transnational implications of the UFLPA,” they said. “Given the EU’s upcoming vote on the forced labor import ban and reports that EU governments continue to resist the European Parliament’s proposal, we believe that initial efforts should prioritize engagement with our European partners and allies, particularly Germany and Italy.”
Germany and Italy were among the countries that sought to derail the corporate sustainability due diligence directive at the last minute, resulting in new carve-outs that many say water down the law’s impact. Any vote can be torpedoed by a “blocking minority” of at least four member states representing more than 35 percent of EU citizens. Germany and Italy house the 27-nation bloc’s largest and third-largest populations, respectively.
The letter comes as U.S. legislators continue to push to eliminate leakage points for forced labor from China, including the de minimis exception that allows millions of small packages to enter the country untaxed and uninspected. On Tuesday, Senator Marco Rubio, a Republican from Florida, dispatched a letter to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas pushing him to investigate Shein and Temu for potential violations of the UFLPA, which the e-tail giants have denied.
“It is past time for the Forced Labor Enforcement Task Force to begin adding entities to the UFLPA exporter list,” he said, referring to the inter-agency group chaired by Department of Homeland Security undersecretary Robert Silvers. “Given the blatant exploitation of trade loopholes that Shein and Temu regularly demonstrate, and the high probability these companies have facilitated the importation of goods made with forced labor, I urge you to investigate these companies and add them to the exporter list…should they be in violation of federal law.”
Meanwhile, Gallagher and Krishnamoorthi asked the State Department to brief Select Committee staff on its strategy for engaging with U.S. allies to “strengthen global prohibitions against goods produced by the PRC’s state-sponsored forced labor programs,” as well as how much progress the EU, U.K., Australia, Japan and others have made in “implementing meaningful prohibitions” against said products.
They also want to know if it would be feasible for the State Department to establish a joint U.S.-EU-U.K. Forced Labor Enforcement Task Force that could coordinate policy and enforcement actions with the U.S. Forced Labor Enforcement Task Force. Last year, the United States and Japan created a joint task force to address the broader topic of worker exploitation in international supply chains. The Biden Administration, Canada, the EU and the United Kingdom have also previously imposed joint sanctions on several Chinese officials for human rights abuses against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities.
“We are particularly concerned that goods made by Uyghur forced labor continue to flood into Europe and the United Kingdom, which some have described as ‘dumping grounds’ for these products that are otherwise banned from importation into the United States,” they said. “The State Department plays a critical role in working with our allies and partners to ensure that companies profiting off the CCP’s ongoing genocide in Xinjiang find no safe markets for their wares.”
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