Many of the world’s biggest fashion brands and retailers are complicit in the forced labor and human rights violations being perpetrated on millions of Uighurs in the Xinjiang region in northwest China, a coalition of more than 180 human rights groups said.
There is mounting global outrage over the atrocities being committed against the Uighur population in the region, including torture, forced separation and the compulsory sterilization of Uighur women.
Despite these abuses, the coalition of human rights groups said that many of the world’s leading clothing brands continue to source cotton and yarn produced through a vast state-sponsored system of forced labor involving up to 1.8 million Uighur and other Turkic and Muslim people in prison camps, factories and farms in Xinjiang.
Illustration: Louise Ting
The forced labor system is the largest internment of an ethnic minority since World War II, it said.
Global fashion brands source so extensively from Xinjiang that the coalition said it is “virtually certain” that as many as one in five cotton products sold worldwide are tainted by the forced labor and human rights violations occurring there.
China is the largest cotton producer in the world, with 84 percent of its cotton coming from Xinjiang. Materials produced in the region are used extensively in other key garment-producing countries such as Bangladesh, Cambodia and Vietnam. Xinjiang cotton and yarn are also used in textiles and home furnishings.
This week, the New York Times reported that factories in the region were also supplying masks and other personal protective equipment to countries worldwide.
The coalition has published an extensive list of brands it said continue to source from the region, or from factories connected with the forced labor of Uighurs, including Gap, C&A, Adidas, Muji, Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein.
“Virtually the entire [global] apparels industry is tainted by forced Uighur and Turkic Muslim labor,” the coalition said in a statement on Thursday.
The coalition said that many more leading clothing brands also continue to maintain strategic partnerships with Chinese companies, accepting subsidies from the government in Beijing to expand textile production in the region, or benefiting from the forced labor of Uighurs transferred from Xinjiang to factories across China.
“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,” said Chloe Cranson, business and human rights manager at Anti-Slavery International.
In a call to action, the coalition, which includes more than 70 Uighur rights groups, anti-slavery organizations and labor rights campaigners, said that the global apparel industry must eradicate all products and materials linked to forced labor in Xinjiang within a year.
“Global brands need to ask themselves how comfortable they are contributing to a genocidal policy against the Uighur people. These companies have somehow managed to avoid scrutiny for complicity in that very policy — this stops today,” Uyghur Human Rights Project executive director Omer Kanat said.
The Worker Rights Consortium (WRC), one of the signatories of the call to action, said that brands have no credible way of proving that their supply chains from Xinjiang are free of forced labor.
“Forced laborers in the Uighur region face vicious retaliation if they tell the truth about their circumstances. This makes due diligence through lab our inspections impossible and virtually guarantees that any brand sourcing from the Uighur region is using forced labor,” WRC executive director Scott Nova said.
“An apparel brand that claims to know, with confidence, that all the farms and factories it uses in the region are free of forced labor is either deeply cynical or misinformed,” Nova added.
In April, the Global Legal Action Network (GLAN), a group of human rights lawyers, also provided evidence to the British tax authority, Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, that brands including Muji, Uniqlo, H&M and IKEA were selling products in the UK containing cotton and yarn from Xinjiang.
GLAN said that the UK government should halt sales of products linked to forced labor across the region as it breached several British laws including the 1897 Foreign Prison-Made Goods Act. In response, H&M and IKEA said that they would stop buying cotton from the region.
In an updated statement to the Guardian, H&M said that it had an indirect relationship with one yarn producer operating in the region, but said it was reviewing the relationship.
Muji said that it continues to use cotton and yarn from Xinjiang, but denies that its materials are connected to forced labor.
“Our business partner [assures] us that the people who make our products have good working conditions and are treated with respect, the independent auditors have conducted on-site audit on these cotton spinning mills and have confirmed that there is no evidence of forced labor and discrimination of ethnoreligious minorities at their facilities,” it said.
A Uniqlo spokesperson said no Uniqlo product is manufactured in the region and all production partners in its supply chain uphold its codes of conduct on human and workers’ rights.
In a statement, PVH, which owns Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger, said that it did not source garments from the region and would cease all business relationships with any factories and mills that produce garments or fabric in Xinjiang or use cotton grown in the region within the next 12 months.
Adidas said that it does not source goods from Xinjiang, and it has instructed its suppliers not to source yarn from the region.
A C&A spokesperson said that it did not source from any manufacturers or work with any fabric or yarn mills in the region.
Yet members of the coalition said that it was not sufficient for brands and retailers to just sever direct relationships to suppliers, but that a complete overhaul of the sector’s links to the region had to be undertaken.
“This isn’t just about direct supply chain links, it’s about how the global apparels sector is helping prop up and facilitate the system of human rights abuses and forced labor,” Crason said. “There needs to be a deep and thorough interrogation of how brands and retailers are linked to what is happening at scale to the Uighur people.”
Gap was contacted for a response.
China’s human rights record in Xinjiang has provoked growing international condemnation. Earlier this month, the US imposed sanctions on Chinese officials in protest of the treatment of the Uighurs and other minority groups, including Kazakhs.
Last week, the Chinese ambassador to the UK denied that his government was committing human rights violations, after videos resurfaced online appear to show shackled and blindfolded Uighur prisoners being loaded on to trains in Xinjiang.
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