This makes due diligence through labour inspections impossible and virtually guarantees that any brand sourcing from the Uighur region is using forced labour,” said Scott Nova, executive director of the WRC. “Forced labourers in the Uighur region face vicious retaliation if they tell the truth about their circumstances. Why more than 1 million Uighurs are being held in camps in China – video explainerĪccording to the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC), one of the signatories of the call to action, brands have no credible way of proving that their supply chains from the Xinjiang are free of forced labour. These companies have somehow managed to avoid scrutiny for complicity in that very policy – this stops today,” said Omer Kanat, executive director of the Uyghur Human Rights Project. “Global brands need to ask themselves how comfortable they are contributing to a genocidal policy against the Uighur people. In a call to action, the coalition, which includes more than 70 Uighur rights groups, anti-slavery organisations and labour rights campaigners, says the global apparel industry must eradicate all products and materials linked to forced labour in Xinjiang within a year. “There is a high likelihood that every high street and luxury brand runs the risk of being linked to what is happening to the Uighur people,” says Chloe Cranston, business and human rights manager at Anti-Slavery International. The coalition says many more leading clothing brands also continue to maintain lucrative strategic partnerships with Chinese companies, accepting subsidies from their government to expand textile production in the region or benefiting from the forced labour of Uighur people transferred from Xinjiang to factories across China. “Virtually the entire apparels industry is tainted by forced Uighur and Turkic Muslim labour,” the coalition said in a statement issued today. Workers at a cotton factory in Awat county, in China’s Xinjiang region.
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