news

Washington, DC --  Today, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Corporate Governance Improvement and Investor Protection Act, along with an amendment that includes the text of Congresswoman Jennifer Wexton’s (D-VA) Uyghur Forced Labor Disclosure Act. Wexton’s Uyghur Forced Labor Disclosure Act requires U.S. publicly listed companies to review and actively audit supply chains for Uyghur forced labor, in response to reports implicating numerous major U.S. companies in the extensive forced labor scheme being carried out against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in China.

More than 100,000 people are estimated to be working under forced conditions in China, either in facilities located within internment camps in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) or through state-sponsored labor transfer schemes that pair workers with work assignments in other Chinese provinces.

“We cannot stand idly by as American companies profit from the brutal forced labor of Uyghurs,” said Congresswoman Jennifer Wexton. “Some of the most common products that we use every day -- our phones, clothes, cars, and more -- have been traced back to the Chinese government’s extensive forced labor scheme. I’m proud of the strong message we sent today that products produced by forced labor have no place on American store shelves and these horrific human rights abuses will not be tolerated.”

Wexton’s legislation directs the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to create rules under which publicly traded companies would be required to disclose annually imports of manufactured goods and materials -- including electronics, textiles, automobile parts, polysilicon, wigs and hair extensions, and shoes -- that originate in or are sourced in part from Xinjiang.

Despite all the recent attention on forced labor, imports from Xinjiang to the U.S. remarkably doubled last year. Imports manufactured with forced labor are banned in the U.S., but the repressive environment in Xinjiang makes auditing of supply chains nearly impossible, and a number of international auditing organizations recently stopped operating in the region due to restricted access to workers and increased difficulty meeting auditing standards.

Congresswoman Wexton’s district is home to one of the largest Uyghur diaspora populations in the U.S. Wexton is a member of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC) and the House Appropriations State and Foreign Operations Subcommittee.

The full text of the Uyghur Forced Labor Disclosure Act can be found here.

###