A UN Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Modern Slavery's report has found it "reasonable to conclude" that forced labour has been taking place in China's Xinjiang province.
The report found that Uyghurs, Kazakhs and other Turkic groups have been subjected to repressive and abusive practices as part of Chinese state-mandated forced labour systems.
"New U.N. Special Rapporteur's Report on Contemporary Forms of Slavery concludes that forced labour is taking place in Xinjiang," Adrian Zenz, a China researcher tweeted, along with a copy of the report.
The Special Rapporteur, Tomoya Obokata, further found that "the nature and extent of powers exercised" meant that "some instances may amount to enslavement as a crime against humanity."
UN human rights experts have raised serious concerns about the alleged detention and forced labour of Muslim Uyghurs in China, calling for unhindered access to the country to conduct fact-finding missions and urging global and domestic companies to closely scrutinize their supply chains.
Uyghur workers have reportedly been subjected to exploitative working and abusive living conditions that may constitute arbitrary detention, human trafficking, forced labour and enslavement by use of forced labour.
Reacting to the latest report, World Uyghur Congress (WUC) President Dolkun Isa said the Special Rapporteur has concluded what those of us in the Uyghur advocacy movement have been saying for years.
"Forced labour programmes have been weaponised as a tool of genocide by the Chinese Communist Party - and yet corporations around the world continue to turn a profit from atrocity and governments refuse to legislate to put a stop to it. This report's findings must be a wakeup call to those that have so far refused to take action on the proliferation of Uyghur forced labour-made goods in global supply chains."
According to a WUC statement, this is a significant development in the international community's response to the Chinese Communist Party's well-documented use of Uyghur forced labour.
"Those implicated cannot feign ignorance when the world's largest and most prolific intergovernmental organisation, the UN, has laid bare the extremities of modern slavery in East Turkistan," WUC said.
The Munich-based organisation called on governments and corporations around the world to acknowledge the findings of the Special Rapporteur's report and take action to ensure they do not remain complicit in crimes against humanity and modern atrocity.
The Special Rapporteur's findings today offer a glimpse of the human rights violations being perpetrated in East Turkistan. The WUC, once again, urges the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, to release her full report on the human rights situation in the region immediately.
( With inputs from ANI )
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