The US Senate recently passed legislation, the Uyghur Forced Labour Prevention Act, to ban the import of products from China's Xinjiang region. Passed by unanimous consent, the bipartisan measure would shift the burden of proof to importers. The current rule bans goods if there is reasonable evidence of forced labour.
The bill must also pass the House of Representatives before it can be sent to the White House for President Joe Biden to sign into law. The United States accuses Beijing of persecuting Uyghurs and other Muslim minority groups in the region.The US Senate recently passed legislation to ban the import of products from China's Xinjiang region. Passed by unanimous consent, the bipartisan measure would shift the burden of proof to importers. The current rule bans goods if there is reasonable evidence of forced labour. The US accuses Beijing of persecuting Uyghurs and other minorities in the region.#
US Republican senator from Florida Marco Rubio, co-author of the Act, welcomed the State Department’s determination that the Chinese government’s and the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) persecution of Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz and members of other Muslim minority groups in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) constitute ‘crimes against humanity and genocide’.
"We will not turn a blind eye to the CCP's ongoing crimes against humanity, and we will not allow corporations a free pass to profit from those horrific abuses," Rubio said in a statement.
Rubio also co-authored the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act of 2020, which was signed into law last December.
The US administration has raised sanctions, and recently issued an advisory, warning businesses they could be in violation of US law if operations are linked even indirectly to surveillance networks in Xinjiang.
Fibre2Fashion News Desk (DS)