The Chinese government’s abuses of Uyghur and other Turkic and Muslim-majority peoples, which have been deemed crimes against humanity, has embroiled leading brands and retailers in a severe human rights crisis. State-sponsored forced labor is widespread in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (Uyghur Region) and intersects with other egregious human rights abuses. These abuses include arbitrary mass detention of an estimated 1 million to 1.8 million people and a program to ‘cleanse’ ethnic groups of their ‘extremist’ thoughts through re-education and forced labor. This involves multiple forms of involuntary labor at workplaces across the region and also in other parts of China. These abuses are bolstered by a pervasive, intrusive technology-enabled system of surveillance and intersect with other human rights abuses including gender-based violence and harassment, forced family separation, forced sterilization, and mandatory political ideological training.

Uyghur forced labor is woven into the fabric of numerous global supply chains. Researchers have linked Uyghur forced labor to the supply chains of at least 17 industries, including apparel, food, mining, green energy, information and communications technology, and automotive.

There are four often intersecting ways that international brands and retailers are contributing to the Uyghur forced labor crisis:

1. Through commercial relationships with any production facilities located within the Uyghur Region;
2. Through commercial relationships with companies based outside of the Uyghur Region that have subsidiaries or operations located in the Uyghur Region and that have accepted Chinese government subsidies and/or employed workers provided by the government;
3. Through commercial relationships with suppliers that have employed, at a workplace outside the Uyghur Region, workers from the Uyghur Region who were sent by the government; and
4. Through business relationships with suppliers in China and globally that source inputs produced in the Uyghur Region, such as, but not limited to, cotton, polysilicon, or aluminum.

Because of the extreme levels of repression and surveillance in the region, the mechanisms that brands and retailers would normally use to ensure that their supply chains are free from forced labor—i.e. labor rights audits—are a practical impossibility in this context. This is because it is not possible for a worker to speak candidly to an independent investigator without the fear of retaliation or reprisal. As such, the only way that brands and retailers can ensure that they are not complicit in Uyghur forced labor is by exiting the region at all levels of the supply chain, from raw materials to finished goods, and ending commercial relationships with companies that are implicated in this forced labor crisis—as has been required since 2022 by the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) for importers into the United States.

Corporations that are complicit in Uyghur forced labor must not wait idly by until they are caught in the enforcement of the UFLPA or of future comparable laws in other markets. Brands and retailers should act now to extricate their supply chains from the Uyghur Region and from facilities employing labor transfers from the region.