TRANSCRIPT
"The community is very, I think we've generally moved past anger. And the main feeling I think is one of resignation and grief as well, grief, because every Uyghur Australian knows someone who back home has been taken to a re-education camp or prison or forced labour facility without due process. "
Since 2017, reports estimate that Chinese authorities have arrested over one million members of the Uyghur [[WEE-GUH]] population, placing them into what the government call re-education camps.
Human rights groups say they're more like concentration camps.
Once detained, many are forced into labour camps and factory work against their will.
Nuria Khasim an Uyghur Australian and Uyghur Rights Advocate, she says testimonies from the camps are harrowing.
"Uyghur victims of forced labour are under military style management by their quote, employers or detainers. If they refuse or walk away from their forced labour assignments, they are threatened that they will return to a re-education camp or even prison. They're forced to live in dormitories and they're not able to leave without permission. They are underpaid, subject to having their salaries, if they are paid a menial salary, reduced on the basis that their owe food accommodation or transport costs to their employers. And so it's essentially this large scale and concentrated removal of freedom and autonomy for a huge segment of the Uyghur population."
The Xinjiang [[shin-JYAHNG]] Uyghur Autonomous Region in northwest China is home to around 11 million Uyghurs, a majority Muslim Turkic-speaking group.
In 2021, the United States signed into law the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act.
The law was intended to ensure goods made in through forced labour in China did not enter the U-S market.
Linda Thomas-Greenfield was the U-S ambassador to the United Nations under recently-departed President Joe Biden.
“In Xinjiang, people are being tortured. Women are being forcibly sterilized. There are incredible reports, and credible reports, that many Uyghur people and other ethnic and religious minorities – who only wish to practice basic freedoms of religion, belief, expression, and movement – are being forced to work until they drop, manufacturing clothes and goods at the behest of the state.”
In 2021, Ms Thomas-Greenfield told U-N members that the Chinese authorities were committing genocide.
"We will keep standing up and speaking out until China’s government stops its crimes against humanity and the genocide of Uyghurs and other minorities in Xinjiang.”
Now, recent reporting by The Guardian has uncovered that Australia is allowing thousands of imports from Chinese companies blacklisted by the U-S over alleged links to forced Uyghur labour.
The report finds that Australia’s imports from companies allegedly involved in forced labour actually increased after the U-S introduced its ban, peaking in 2023.
Australia's Modern Slavery Act was introduced in 2018.
The act requires businesses to report on the risks of modern slavery in their operations and supply chains.
But with aims to increase transparency and accountability, some experts argue it isn't fit for purpose.
Nuria Khasim says because the act relies on transparency, it places the responsibility of avoiding forced labour into the hands of consumers.
"That sort of regime puts a lot of onus on the consumer because consumers are then sort of imagined to go online, read those statements and use those statements as a basis to make ethical or informed decisions about their purchases. And that sort of transparency based regime is known to have a limited effectiveness, especially when it has really weak compliance mechanisms. So under the current regime, if an entity doesn't actually meet its reporting obligations, there aren't really consequences. And we also know as consumers that we aren't cross-referencing this extensive list of reports to varying degrees of comprehensiveness and quality as well."
According to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, outside work hours, Uyghurs are forced to attend factory-organised Mandarin language classes, participate in patriotic education, and are prevented from practising their religion.
In January this year, a 49-year-old Uyghur woman was sentenced to seventeen years for teaching the Quran to her two sons, who were also sentenced to seven and ten years.
Some human rights groups say the Chinese government is attempting to rid China of potentially dissenting voices, with fears ethnic minorities will attempt to gain independence.
According to China, the state policies in Xinjiang are simply an effort to combat religious extremism and separatism.
Kathryn Allan is the International and Crisis Campaigner at Amnesty International Australia.
"The Chinese government is saying that essentially there is no existence of these sorts of camps and that they're not illegal, but they're being sent to these transformation through education centres that all these people are going through voluntarily, but we know that people are being sent by force and it's up to authority to decide when the detainee is transformed enough to have graduated from these education centres. We also know that those who put up resistance are punished and this ranges from verbal abuse to depriving people of food to solitary confinement and be things, and there have been multiple reports of deaths inside the facilities."
In 2024, new legislation in the Xinjiang region introduced regulations requiring all new places of worship to reflect Chinese characteristics and style.
Reports have found that thousands of mosques in the Uyghur region have been destroyed by Chinese authorities, who impose increasingly strict rules on how and when religion can be practiced.
In 2021, the Executive Director of Human Rights Watch Kenneth Roth, told the United Nations that fears of extremism are a poor excuse for what's occurring.
“Human Rights Watch recently found that this combination of atrocities amounts to the crime against humanity of persecution; a deliberate effort to deny of the most fundamental rights the people of this regions, the Uyghur and other Turkic Muslims in order to snuff out their culture and their religion. Now the Chinese Government claims that this is about fighting terrorism, but frankly Beijing doesn't even pretend that this is a targeted effort. This sweeping broad-based persecution is a blatant attack on Islam and on Uyghur culture. Terrorism is a feeble pretext.”
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun told the United Nations the allegations are false.
“China has nothing to hide on Xinjiang. Xinjiang is always open. Over 1,200 diplomats, journalists, scholars from over 100 countries have visited Xinjiang in the past year. We welcome everyone to visit Xinjiang, but we oppose any kind of investigation based on lies and with the presumption of guilt, which no sovereign state could accept. Xinjiang is a beautiful, peaceful and prosperous place. Your attempt of using Xinjiang to contain China is doomed to fail.”
With many regulations targeting imports from the Xinjiang Uyghur region, some experts say Chinese authorities are attempting to obfuscate the laws by forcibly transferring Uyghur detainees to other parts of the country.
Nuria Khasim says as forced labour practices are used outside of the Uyghur region, companies and governments are able to continue importing forced labour products.
"I think that the scary truth is the true extent of how much the products that we use and love are tainted by forced labour is probably a lot worse than we're able to clarify at this stage. In my opinion, from China's perspective, it's very strategic because now we have really powerful companies. We have corporations that are supplying government contracts across the world and products that are really familiar to modern consumers all becoming complicit in this web of forced labour. And ultimately what that does is it makes untangling the web even more difficult."
She says the full extent of the forced labour is likely unknown.
"It's also terrifying because in China, corporations that do sort of transfer or employ Uyghur extra from re-education camps, they're offered rewards by the government, which include tax reductions and exemptions, subsidies for training, transport and salaries. When you look at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute report, which was titled Uyghurs for Sale, there's analysis of Chinese language internet ads that say, "Hey, I've got a group of 40 young disciplined, well-trained Uyghur people ready to be transferred to China, to inland China for labor, et cetera."
In its findings, The Guardian's report says that the products imported into Australia come from a range of sectors, including parts for car batteries and trains used by state governments; safety gear for tradespeople; spices and food additives, as well as laser printers.
As well as these, Xinjiang is one of the world's largest producers of polysilicon, a crucial ingredient in modern-day solar panels.
Ms Allan says while trade and diplomacy with China is important, human rights can't be overlooked at any stage of trade relations.
"We would really like to see that Australia and other countries are not deterred by the Chinese government's transparent attempt to bully them into silence and no state, no matter how influential should be shielded from the accountability for human rights violations. We also know that Australia and China do have a strong trade relationship and we believe that human rights should be mentioned at all times in any conversations with all Chinese counterparts."
Nuria says it can seem insurmountable trying to disentangle the global supply chain from forced labour practices.
With products linked to Uyghur forced labour showing up in products used by major rail networks in Australian capital cities, Uyghur and human rights advocates say the Australian government can and should do more.
"I think it's just really important to try and remember that the human cost of this, this isn't just an abstract case study. When we say that Uyghur forced labour is prolific, when we say that there are hundreds and thousands of Uyghur people involved or subject to this cruel regime, it's human beings. It's my fellow people who speak my language, who share my culture and my heritage, who are as fully fleshed human beings as I am, who are being put in this horrible working, living and detention condition. And I know it's very difficult to humanise a story when we have a scale like this, but I just think that's so important to remember."
SBS News contacted the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade for comment on this story, but received no response.
