The article below was originally published by Sourcing Journal, photo credit: Sourcing Journal.
United Nations experts have expressed what they characterize as “deep concern” over persistent allegations of forced labor involving Uyghur, Kazakh and Kyrgyz minority groups, as well as Tibetans, in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region and elsewhere in China.
“There is a persistent pattern of alleged state-imposed forced labor involving ethnic minorities across multiple provinces in China,” a panel of special rapporteurs and working group members appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council said in a statement Thursday. “In many cases, the coercive elements are so severe that they may amount to forcible transfer and/or enslavement as a crime against humanity.”
While the detention camps that drew massive global outrage have, for the most part, shuttered, forced labor in China continues to be enabled through the government-mandated “poverty alleviation through labor transfer” program, which coerces persecuted minorities into employment across the country, where they’re subjected to “monitoring, surveillance and exploitation, with no choice to refuse or change the work due to a pervasive fear of punishment and arbitrary detention,” the experts said.
And though Xinjiang’s five-year plan from 2021 to 2025 projected 13.75 million instances of labor transfers, the actual numbers have “reached new heights,” they added.
Tibetans are also subject to forced labor through similar schemes such as the Training and Labor Transfer Action Plan, which calls for the systematic training and transfer of “rural surplus laborers” using what the experts described as “coercive methods” such as military-style vocational training. Close to 650,000 Tibetans, they said, have been affected by labor transfers in 2024.
The labor transfers are part of a government policy to “forcibly re-engineer” Uyghur, other minorities and Tibetans’ cultural identities “under the guise of poverty alleviation,” the experts warned.
“Labor and land transfers forcibly change their agriculture-based or nomadic traditional livelihoods by displacing them to locations where they have no choice but to pursue wage labor,” they said. “Consequently, their language, chosen communities, ways of life, as well as cultural and religious practices are eroded, which causes irreparable harm and loss.”
Companies operating in and sourcing from China must conduct human rights due diligence in line with the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights to ensure that their supply chains are not “tainted by forced labor,” they added.
In a press briefing on Friday, Guo Jiakun, a spokesperson for China’s foreign ministry, denounced the UN’s “so-called ‘concerns’” as “fabricated” and “completely unfounded.”
“The Chinese government has been committed to promoting and protecting human rights. Development and progress in Xinjiang and Xizang are there for all to see,” he said, using the latter term to refer to Tibet. “This is an undeniable fact.” Guo urged the experts to “respect the facts” and “perform their duties impartially and objectively and not become tools and accomplices of anti-China forces.”
The UN experts’ raised alarm follows the opening of a congressional inquiry into the Customs and Border Protection’s enforcement of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act in the United States, which has diminished significantly in recent months, despite “no evidence that shipments of goods prohibited by the law have slowed,” lawmakers said.
Writing to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and CBP Commissioner Rodney S. Scott in December, more than a dozen Democratic representatives—including Rosa L. DeLauro of Connecticut, Raja Krishnamoorthi of Illinois and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota—expressed their “grave concern” over the decline in stopped shipments suspected of breaching the UFLPA. They noted that detentions fell from monthly averages of 334 and 383 in 2023 and 2024, respectively, to just over 100 per month in April and May 2025, when President Donald Trump announced his “Liberation Day” tariff escalations. Between April and August of the same year, they said, stopped shipments averaged 224 per month, or down from the previous five-month average of 1,062 per month.
“This represents more than a fourfold reduction in CBP stopped shipments,” the lawmakers said. “This reduction in stopped shipments appears to conflict with the Department of Homeland Security’s stated goals contained in the August 2025 report to Congress, where the Department reaffirmed its commitment to enforcing UFLPA and even commits to expanding enforcement of the law.”
Of particular concern, they added, was the fact that the DHS-led Forced Labor Enforcement Task Force had added no new entities to the UFLPA Entity List since Jan. 15, 2025. Coupled with staff and funding cuts that “decimated” the State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, its Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor and the Labor Department’s Bureau of International Labor Affairs, as well as caused the “demise” of the U.S. Agency for International Development, this suggests that “combating forced labor is not a priority for this administration.”
“UFLPA enforcement is about more than the moral imperative to fight forced labor. The PRC government has a documented history of using lax environmental laws and forced labor as effective subsidies for their manufacturers,” the Democratic leaders said, using an acronym for the People’s Republic of China. “This creates an uneven playing field upon which companies that adhere to the international rules-based order are at a disadvantage. Relaxing enforcement of the law poses a direct risk to U.S. industry and workers competing in the global economy.”
Adding to the lawmakers’ unease are reports that the CBP’s “precipitous drop” in UFLPA enforcement may be due to the agency diverting resources to implement the White House’s “dramatic changes to trade and tariff policy.”
“The on-and-off nature of the tariffs has created an extremely unpredictable business environment, creating instability for businesses trying to plan for the future and reducing investment and productivity,” they said. “Unsurprisingly, President Trump’s promise that his trade policies would revitalize American manufacturing and bring down the trade deficit has also not come true as he has piled onto his chaotic tariff announcements by gutting historic investments in U.S. manufacturing and clean energy production.”
Some of the questions the inquiry seeks to answer: What factors have led to the decrease in UFLPA enforcement since March 2025? How does CBP plan to continue working with other FLETF members to flag shipments that potentially violate the UFLPA following cuts to forced labor programming and research funding? Why have no new entities been added to the UFLPA Entity List in more than a year, and what is CBP’s plan for working with other FLETF member agencies to add new entities to the list?
But a CBP said there has been no drop in UFLPA enforcement. In fact, “enforcement is up,” a spokesperson said. In fiscal year 2025, CBP averaged about 1,867 detentions per month, an 89 percent increase compared to the fiscal year 2024 average of 984. Total shipments stopped have risen year over year, increasing from 11,816 in fiscal year 2024 to 22,398 in fiscal year 2025.
“Strong enforcement is driving better importer compliance and directly supports the president’s America First trade agenda, where trade enforcement is essential to national security and fair competition for U.S. businesses and workers,” the spokesperson added.
For organizations such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization in the United States, the issue boils down to keeping goods made with the forced labor of Uyghur and other ethnic groups out of the United States, as the UFLPA was designed to do.
“The Chinese Communist Party’s inhumane brutality is apparent to all. Forcing Uyghur Muslims, Tibetans and other minorities into forced labor is nothing short of a crime against humanity and must be condemned by all nations,” it said in response to the UN experts’ remarks. “We call on the Trump administration to make sure that no products produced through slave labor are allowed to be imported into our country.”
Mamtimin Ala, president of the East Turkistan Government in Exile, a Uyghur exile group that uses the historical name for Xinjiang, said, however, that the UN’s findings underscore a “fundamental failure of the international community,” which needs to “move beyond statements and reports” by “pursuing prosecutions before international courts.”
“There is no path to ending genocide or enslavement while our people remain under Chinese colonial rule,” Ala said. “As long as East Turkistan is occupied, these crimes will continue. Decolonization and the restoration of our independence are not optional. They are necessary for survival.”