The United States Senate passed on Thursday through bipartisan support the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which aims to ban imports from the Xinjiang Province of China that is renowned to use forced labor involving the Uyghur Muslim minority.
WNG said importers from the said region would have to prove that their products did not use forced labor. The bill is said to be supported by President Joe Biden who relayed thru White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki on Tuesday that he intends to sign it the soonest.
Supporting this move, the United States Commerce Department have already blacklisted also on Thursday almost a dozen biotechnology institutes from China and its Academy Military Medical Sciences as a precautionary measure against American companies selling to entities who use technologies that discriminate the Uyghur ethnic minority.
In January, former United States Secretary of State Mike Pompeo exposed "available facts" that prove the Chinese Communist Party has been committing "genocide" through a variety of human rights violations against the Uyghurs. These facts were further strengthened in March when news of an Uyghur textile merchant died after being released from a three-year concentration camp imprisonment. Almost 2 million Uyghurs are reported to be imprisoned in the camp since 2018.
But the Chinese government refuted such news that point to their motive of eradicating the entire Uyghur minority. They have been reported to fabricate information to justify their inhumane treatment of the said minority. However, survivors of the concentration camp have come out to decry the Chinese government's actions such as Tursunay Ziyawudun who testified to her harrowing experiences during the International Religious Freedom Summit held in Washington, D.C. last July.
Last month, an Uyghur Tribunal has announced that it will come out with a verdict against China's criminal offenses against minorities that include Turkic Muslims, Kazakhs, and the Uyghurs.
Florida Senator Marco Rubio, who co-sponsored the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act with Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley, New Jersey Representative Chris Smith, and Massachusetts Representative James McGovern, expressed in a press release that the bill aims to stop the Chinese government's atrocities.
"And we know it's happening at an alarming, horrific rate with the genocide that we now witness being carried out by the Chinese government in the Xinjiang region. And this bill, which we hope here in a few moments passes today, will head to the President, become law, and it will help tremendously in stopping that from happening," Rubio said.
Speaking on the Senate floor ahead of the bill's passage on Thursday, Rubio requested for unanimous support of the bill among his co-legislators by pointing out to a 1930 law that makes it "illegal, by the way to bring goods made with slave labor." Rubio stressed that this matter is still happening in Xinjiang yet people continue to support products from such forced labor by "looking away" from this reality.
"Many companies have already taken steps to clean up their supply chains. And, frankly, they should have no concerns about this law. For those who have not done that, they'll no longer be able to continue to make Americans--every one of us, frankly--unwitting accomplices in the atrocities, in the genocide that's being committed by the Chinese Communist Party," Rubio underscored.
