In January, the UK Parliament’s Business and Trade Committee questioned Chinese fashion company SHEIN as part of an enquiry into workers’ rights. 

Yinan Zhu, EMEA General Counsel at SHEIN, was unable to answer questions on whether the company sells clothing that contains cotton from the Xinjiang region in China where Uyghur Muslims and other Turkic minorities are allegedly forced to work and subject to abuse, torture and other human rights violations. 

Chair of the committee, Liam Byrne, said that SHEIN’s reluctance to answer ‘basic questions’ about the materials used in its products and the working conditions of its employees ‘bordered on contempt of the Committee’.

The committee, which said it had been left with ‘zero confidence’ in the integrity of SHEIN’s supply chains, also did not receive an answer from the company on how it defined appropriate working hours following allegations that manufacturers used by SHEIN had employees working 18 hour days with only one day off a month. 

SHEIN told Global Insight: ‘SHEIN takes supply chain risks extremely seriously and strictly prohibits forced labour in its supply chain globally. SHEIN complies with all applicable laws and regulations in the countries in which it operates, including the Modern Slavery Act and the Proceeds of Crime Act in the UK.’

The UK’s Modern Slavery Act was introduced in 2015 and requires businesses with a turnover of £36m or more to publish an annual statement on their efforts to prevent modern slavery in their supply chains. In recent years the law has received criticism over the quality and scope of the modern slavery statements and the lack of enforcement around the reporting requirements. ‘The sense is that there needs to be something that makes companies much more alert to their responsibilities because at the moment it’s a bit of a box ticking exercise,’ says KC.

Many companies in the UK, US and EU outsource the work of supply chain due diligence to law firms or corporate investigations companies. Anwar Darkazally, a managing partner at Field Intelligence in London and an officer of the IBA’s Business and Human Rights Committee, says that sanctions related to the US Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act are something his clients take seriously when looking at the fast fashion sector. ‘Sanctions are an issue globally of great concern to our clients because they do not want to fall foul, and in particular be blocked from doing business with the US, or lose access to their banking facilities,’ he says.

Darkazally explains that to mitigate risks companies can use open-source research, which examines publicly available data, and human source research, which involves speaking to people with firsthand knowledge of entities involved in a certain type of business. ‘It is possible, for example, if you have a Chinese speaker, to be able to navigate some Chinese websites and databases, which will show a chain of relationships in far more detail,’ he says.

The UN, an independent people’s tribunal in London and the US government have concluded that China may have committed crimes against humanity against Uyghurs in Xinjiang. KC, who was sanctioned by China for speaking out about the abuses, says that the IBA’s Human Rights Institute has concluded that crimes against humanity at the very least, and possibly even genocide, are taking place against Uyghur Muslims and other Turkic minorities in Xinjiang.

When it comes to stopping UK based businesses from profiting from Uyghur forced labour KC believes that the UK should introduce import bans on cotton from the Xinjiang region. ‘I would want to be looking at having import bans on commodities coming from certain places where we know there’s a presumption that forced labour is in the supply chain if it’s coming from Xinjiang,’ she says.

In January, UK Chancellor Rachel Reeves visited Beijing to strengthen economic cooperation and trade ties with China and boasted securing £600m worth of agreements for the UK economy. In a statement about the trip the UK government said Reeves raised human rights, including Xinjiang, and forced labour, with Chinese officials and made it clear that China’s sanctions against UK parliamentarians were unacceptable. 

KC says that conversations with China about trade and forced labour in Xinjiang need to be held within the wider context of human rights and paying people fairly for the work they do. ‘I believe we should always be holding the doors open to have decent conversations and one of the ways that I would be wanting to see a conversation with China taking place on this is around employment practices. To be talking about the ways all of us struggle to create fairness in the workplace and proper reward for people’s work,’ she says.

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