forced labor

Canada is investigating its branches of Walmart, Hugo Boss, and Diesel for the alleged use of Uyghur slavery in their supply chains.

A report published by the Business & Human Rights Resource Center (BHRRC) on Wednesday accused Chinese companies of more than a hundred human rights and environmental abuses at the mines where China produces much of the world’s supply of “green energy” minerals, such as lithium, cobalt, copper, and various rare earths.

The House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party on Thursday warned there is an “extremely high risk” of encountering products made by slaves when shopping with two popular Chinese fast-fashion brands: Shein and Temu.

A group of activists demonstrating against China’s use of Uyghur Muslims as slaves crashed German automaker Volkswagen’s shareholder meeting in Berlin on Wednesday.

During portions of interviews aired on Friday’s broadcast of CNBC’s “Last Call,” U.S. Customs and Border Protection Office of Trade Executive Assistant Commissioner Annmarie Highsmith and Assistant Port Director for the Port of New York/Newark Edward Fox said that determining

The 52nd session of the U.N. Human Rights Council (UNHRC) convened this week — with 70 percent of the membership consisting of autocracies, dictatorships, and other non-democratic nations.

A group of Cuban activists and health professionals criticized the communist Castro regime’s plans to send an additional 119 Cuban slave doctors to Mexico, at a time when the nation’s precarious and understaffed healthcare system faces its worst crisis in more than six decades of communist rule.

Chinese customs data reviewed by the South China Morning Post (SCMP) on Tuesday showed exports from the Xinjiang region to the United States nearly tripled year-on-year in September 2022, despite tougher scrutiny for forced labor imposed by the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA).

Qatar’s preparations to host the FIFA World Cup beginning on November 20 are drawing complaints from labor and human rights activists, who say the authoritarian Islamist government is abusing immigrant workers and arbitrarily detaining homosexuals.

The Associated Press (AP) reported Tuesday that a coalition of major U.S. companies, including Walmart and General Motors, is quietly lobbying the government to make certain import data confidential — a change that would make it much more difficult for journalists and human rights activists to link imported goods to abusive labor practices abroad, including forced labor in China’s Xinjiang province and child labor in Africa.

Two Texas Republicans, Reps. August Pfluger and Michael McCaul, are seeking answers from U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) about how the agency screens critical minerals imported from China.

The European Union has now formally proposed a ban on all goods made with forced labour from being sold within the bloc, a move that is seen as being aimed at China’s abuse of minorities.

The long-delayed U.N. human rights office report on China’s abuse of the Uyghur Muslims was finally released on Wednesday, the last day in office for outgoing High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet.

Qatar, which will host the 22nd FIFA World Cup beginning in late November, announced the arrest of 60 protesting foreign workers on Sunday. The workers were protesting the lack of pay for their labor.

Chinese solar power company Hoshine Silicon Industry was targeted by U.S. sanctions in June 2021 for allegedly using forced labor to create its products. A little over a year later, Hoshine stock is up 111 percent, the personal fortune of founder Luo Liguo has doubled, and the Luo family is spending a billion dollars to expand the company’s presence in Xinjiang province, home of the enslaved Uyghur Muslims.

American solar energy companies are reportedly having difficulty complying with the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA), a law that went into effect in June requiring importers to prove their goods are not tainted with slave labor from the oppressed Uyghur Muslims of China’s Xinjiang province. 

China’s state-run Global Times on Tuesday railed at length against the alleged “unilateralism, protectionism, and bullying” of America’s Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) – but also admitted the law is working as intended, even before it officially went into effect on Tuesday.

Tuesday marked the implementation of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA), which passed Congress last year and was signed into law by President Joe Biden in December 2021.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection recently seized a shipment of products made by the U.S.-based shoe brand Skechers on suspicion that the items may have been manufactured through slave labor by Uyghur ethnic minorities from China’s western Xinjiang region, the state-run Global Times reported on Thursday.

China’s frantic efforts to distract from the Uyghur genocide hit a new low on Wednesday, as the Chinese Foreign Ministry tried claiming it is the United States, rather than China, that is the “epicenter” of forced labor in the world.

The Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) described the upcoming 2022 World Cup, scheduled to take place in repressive Qatar, as “a celebration of unity and diversity” this week after years of accusations of human rights atrocities in the country including forced labor used to build soccer facilities.

The Chinese Communist Party’s latest tactic for whitewashing the mass imprisonment, brainwashing, and enslavement of the Uyghur Muslims involves recruiting young foreign travel bloggers to depict the Uyghurs’ home of Xinjiang Province as a happy land of content and productive citizens.

Twenty North Korean women working for a clothing company in Shanghai vanished from their dormitory along with their manager in February, a potentially awkward case kept very quiet by both Chinese and North Korean officials until Radio Free Asia (RFA) reported it on Wednesday.

Japanese clothing giant Uniqlo, embroiled in controversy last year for refusing to stop buying cotton from China’s slave fields in Xinjiang province, on Monday refused to close its stores in Russia as other fashion houses have done.

Humanitarian activists and U.N. officials are calling for sanctions against the Taliban to be eased so aid can be rendered to the sick, starving, and soon-to-be freezing Afghan people – but Radio Free Europe (RFE) on Tuesday documented how the Taliban is looting aid programs to pay its officials, and even withholding food to force Afghan civilians into slavery.

China offered increased “law enforcement and security” support for Kazakhstan on Sunday, to help it suppress the remainder of the protest movement that broke out on January 1 and was brutally crushed with Russian military assistance over the weekend.

Walmart’s big-box discount store Sam’s Club held a conference call on Wednesday in which it denied pulling products from its shelves because they were sourced to Xinjiang, where the oppressed Muslim Uyghurs are sold as slaves by the Chinese Communist regime. 

An activist group called the Coalition to End Forced Labor in the Uyghur Region on Tuesday charged the International Olympic Committee (IOC) with refusing to answer if slaves are making its merchandise for the Beijing Winter Games.

China’s state-run Global Times on Friday denounced the U.S. Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act as an act of “blasphemy against real democracy, human rights, and free trade.”

The Senate on Thursday passed the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act by unanimous consent, sending the bill to President Joe Biden’s desk for signature.

According to an investigation published by Axios on Tuesday, top Olympic sponsor Airbnb offers over a dozen homes for rent in the Xinjiang region of China, home of the oppressed Uyghur Muslims – many of whom have been forced from their own homes into concentration camps and sold to both Chinese and foreign corporations as slaves.

U.S. President Joe Biden cannot entirely refute allegations that his government released a group of migrant children to labor traffickers.

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), the UK Guardian, and a non-profit group called the Investigative Reporting Project Italy published a joint investigation on Friday that found several large grocery store chains have been selling tomato products allegedly made with forced labor from the Uyghur Muslims of Xinjiang province. 

A bipartisan congressional panel on Tuesday criticized brands such as Coca-Cola, Visa, Intel, Airbnb, and Procter & Gamble for sponsoring the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics despite China’s human rights violations, including the genocide of Uyghur Muslims.

France is investgating four fashion companies for the alleged use of slave labour in the Xinjiang region of China.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) on Wednesday banned the import of solar panel materials from Hoshine Silicon Industry, a Chinese company accused of enslaving Uyghur Muslims.