Uyghur and Turkic Muslims: Forced Labour in China

Marie Rimmer Excerpts

Wednesday 6th November 2024 Westminster Hall

[Ms Marie Rimmer (St Helens South and Whiston) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to work under your chairmanship for the first time, Mr Dowd. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for East Renfrewshire (Blair McDougall) for securing this essential debate.

Now that we have a Labour Government, we have an opportunity to review our trade and diplomatic relations with nations, not least with China. We know that many manufactured goods exported from China have used forced labour by Uyghur and Turkic Muslims, not least in the solar, electric vehicle, cotton and seafood industries. Absent from the last Parliament was a human rights approach to trade. We have an opportunity to reset our trade policies and international relations and to ensure that countries that exploit labour know the consequences. We must not stand by when Uyghur and Turkic Muslims are exposed to slave labour, torture and re-education programmes.

As the Minister knows, I have been challenging the UK’s approach to trade with China in the light of the harvesting of organs and the use of forced labour; I sought to amend the Medicines and Medical Devices Act 2021 and the Procurement Act 2023. Over the past few years, UK legislation has fallen behind developments in the supply chain. Our laws urgently need to be enhanced to protect human rights.

Such crimes must be held against the standards set in international law, and where found wanting, sanctions imposed. I call on our Government to clean up the supply chain and ensure that China is held to account for the abuses perpetrated. Britian has been a soft touch and now we need to be in touch with the reality of these atrocities. The evidence is there—from submissions to The Hague to inside reports—that these crimes are being committed.

Today it is estimated that 40% of the UK’s solar industry and 45% of the world’s solar-grade polysilicon supply are connected to the Uyghur region of China. That means that 97% of the world’s solar panels could contain polysilicon made in the Uyghur region of China, which has credibly been reported as being at risk of association with Uyghur forced labour. As Labour progresses with its green energy sprint, it is vital that clean energy means clean procurement. Similar breaches have been exposed in the batteries for electrical vehicles.

Will the Minister introduce a presumptive ban on imports from Xinjiang, akin to the US Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, so that unless a business provides clear and convincing evidence that goods sourced in Xinjiang were not made with forced labour, they will be prohibited?

We need to further review our modern slavery legislation. Section 54 of the Modern Slavery Act 2015 needs to be more robust. Can we please review it so that companies and their supply chains can be held to account? Should companies be found in breach of cleaning up their supply chains, significant penalties should be applied to the perpetrators.

We need a serious trade framework making it explicitly clear that the UK will cease all trade if there are traces of forced or slave labour. The reported abuse of Uyghur and Turkic Muslims is a significant breach of the values of our country and our Government, and we must seek to lead the way to ensure that our trade restrictions become freedoms for the Uyghur and Turkic Muslims.

It has been less than 16 hours since I sat and listened to two Falun Gong people—a woman and a man—in Room G off Westminster Hall last night. One had been imprisoned in Xinjiang for over 20 years—taken in and brought out, taken in and brought out, for years, and tortured. She is now here in this country. I listened to her. It was harrowing. It was horrifying. A younger man was also there; he had been in a number of times and escaped—got out.

I have met a doctor who escaped and is now living in this country. He did not know what the scar he had was until he was taken into hospital for something while over here. It was found that part of a kidney and part of a lung had been extracted, and there was no point in taking those from him. He was a prisoner.

They were all Falun Gong, and what is happening to Uyghurs now is what has happened to Falun Gong. Since we started looking at this situation and raising things in the UK, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights concluded in 2022 that violations in the region

“may constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity.”

The UK Parliament voted on 22 April 2021 to recognise those atrocities as genocide. Since then, Beijing has renamed hundreds of villages and towns, continuing the effort to subsume and eradicate any Uyghur culture. New regulations are in force that further restrict religious practice. Volkswagen and SHEIN have come under heavy pressure for continuing to source from the Uyghur region, with attendant risk of supply chain slavery.

Many internment camps have been abandoned since 2023. Information from the region is scarce, but it would be accurate to suggest that persecution has not ceased. Rather, there appears to be a move away from internment in labour camps towards larger numbers imprisoned—one in 26 Uyghurs. The extraction of organs in organ harvesting happens at age 28. The three organs survive when taken from these young men while they are alive, because it is most successful if they are fresh and taken from live bodies. That is what happens in organ harvesting.

In April 2022 the Health and Care Act came into force, introducing significant reforms to the administration and delivery of health and care services in England. Section 47 of the Act mandates a comprehensive review by the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care to assess the potential risks of slavery and human trafficking within the NHS chain. The recent review undertaken by NHS England and Supply Chain Coordination Ltd scrutinised 1,361 suppliers. It encompassed 600,000 products, including approximately 30,000 cotton-based items. The review revealed that 21% of UK health procurement is categorised as being at high risk of involvement with slavery.

An estimated 40% of the UK solar industry is credibly reported to be at risk of being tainted by Uyghur forced labour. We have inadequate laws on public procurement, and they need to be sorted out. Falun Gong is near the end. The hounding of these people is international; it is even in this country. A woman was left splayed on the ground outside our British Museum. No one went near her and no police came—nothing. We are having further investigations into that.

We have had police in “stations” in Manchester. This is all about controlling different categories of Muslims. There may be slight changes, but we can all practise our religion or practise none if we so wish. What steps will the Minister and our Government take to ensure that Great Britain cleans itself up? How will we ensure that people can live in other countries and not be persecuted for cheap labour?

All this is about keeping the Communist party in China, along with the Communist party in Russia. We are in a dreadful situation in our world, and Great Britain really must step up. Our Government cannot allow us to drift along, which is what will happen if we do not step up soon.

Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Bill

Marie Rimmer Excerpts

Consideration of Lords amendments
Monday 4th September 2023 Commons Chamber

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

Again, thank you for your brevity, Liam Byrne.

[Ms Marie Rimmer (St Helens South and Whiston) (Lab)]

I would like to pay my respects to my hon. Friend the Member for Feltham and Heston (Seema Malhotra) for her excellent opening on our behalf, as well as to my right hon. Friend the Member for Barking (Dame Margaret Hodge) for her excellent knowledge and understanding. The time she has put in is just unbelievable. She spoke about Bill Browder—no one can read his work without realising just how serious this issue is. I also thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Liam Byrne), who covered it so aptly and brought it down to how dangerous and very serious this is for our democracy and our economic equality. What could happen, and what I think will happen, is frightening.

I want to focus on the importance of legislating on the failure to prevent fraud and money laundering, which are crimes committed in the shadows. Currently, there is a severe lack of provisions to prevent economic crime, which we know is the best, cheapest and most effective way to tackle our dirty money problem. These crimes are committed and witnessed by some of the most senior professionals at a company, and even if they are not participating but just happen to witness fraud, surely they must be under a legal duty to report it. Amendment 159 was introduced in the other place, and I pay my respects to the other place for its absolutely wonderful scrutiny of the Bill. I commend it to the Minister. He has spearheaded the Bill to where it is now, but he just needs to go that bit further.

We must have reasonable prevention mechanisms in place. The failure to prevent measures would work on multiple fronts. First and foremost, they would act as a deterrent, forcing companies to act and to take economic crime seriously if they know they would be held liable. Deterrence is proven to work. As a health and safety professional, I know that regulations to make companies and directors liable made tremendous inroads on health and safety. We may wonder why there were always so many disputes on construction sites, but it was because there was no health and safety. The workers had to fight for everything, and they could not do it without legislation. That is why we are here: to tackle things when they are not being tackled, and economic crime is not being tackled at the present time. That legislation resulted in a 90% drop in deaths and serious injuries on construction sites, which could have involved just building a few houses.

Secondly, regulatory factors such as the fines that exist are not sufficient to bring about the required change. After all, the fines could be a lot less than these companies are earning from economic crime, and they become a cost factored into doing business for those companies. This cannot be right, and it simply cannot continue. To our shame, Britain is the global hotbed of economic crime, at a cost of £350 billion a year. The people of Ukraine are feeling the impact of this unchecked economic crime, as some of the main benefactors have been Russian oligarchs, the Russian state and Putin himself. There are the Magnitsky sanctions, but it tells us a lot, does it not, when Putin kills his own people as a deterrent? When we look at the invasion of Ukraine, we cannot sit back and let this continue unchecked.

The Government amendments to cover this do not go far enough. Well-organised criminal entities would easily get around legislation that only touches the largest companies and the largest businesses. They take advantage of small and medium-sized businesses, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill said. That is exactly what they do—they do whatever it takes. They are cleverer than us, and they are doing it now. Well-organised criminals will get around it. As 64% of companies have experienced fraud, this would help those companies.

The Government legislation fails to make failure to prevent money laundering an offence. The justification for doing that is the money laundering regulations, yet there has been only one corporate conviction since they were introduced—that of NatWest in 2021. Clearly, the money laundering regulations are not good enough. The new legislation would make companies prove that they have the right procedures in place to prevent money laundering. This is the type of tough legislation we need to crack down on economic crime. For too long Britain has been the laundromat for foreign despots and dictators.

I heard a Member across the Floor talking about feeling the chill; what is more chilling than seeing what is going on and turning a blind eye, not washing the blood off our hands for the crimes against humanity committed for the very money being laundered around our country? I urge the Minister—I know where his heart is—not to throw away this wonderful opportunity to save so much. Democracy is at risk. It really is not acceptable. Please be brave enough—be brave enough and you will sleep at night.

[Kevin Hollinrake]

I thank all Members for their contributions. I will not reiterate all the points I made in my opening speech, which addressed many of the points raised in the debate but shall talk to a few of the points made.

My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Sir Jeremy Wright) made some points that were also reflected by my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for South Swindon (Sir Robert Buckland). My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kenilworth and Southam challenged me to explain why subsection (4)(a) of the proposed new clause in Lords amendment 151 does not prevent excessive burdens on SMEs. That measure says we must have in place “such prevention procedures” and there is a concern that many millions of SMEs across the country would have to put in place prevention procedures despite there probably being no chance of any fraud at that organisation. So there would be burdens that otherwise would not exist on those businesses.