Stringency of US Forced Labor Law Is Crucial to Its Success, 27 November 2023

..[T]he United States has passed the strongest piece of legislation globally to address state-imposed Uyghur forced labor, focusing on U.S.-facing supply chains: the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA), which entered into force on June 21, 2022.

The new law established a “rebuttable presumption” against the importation of any goods mined, produced, or manufactured wholly or in part in the Uyghur Region, or produced by certain listed entities.

When the presumption applies, goods cannot come into the United States unless Customs and Border Protection (CBP) determines that the importer has provided clear and convincing rebuttal evidence.

Importers should by now be well aware that the sine qua non of genuine compliance is tracing their entire supply chains down to the raw material level down to the raw material level and being able to provide full documentation to CBP on each link in these chains.

This level of traceability is necessary for any company to know whether they are sourcing goods made with Uyghur forced labor, or any type of forced labor for that matter.

The UFLPA and related customs laws give CBP—a law enforcement agency—the necessary flexibility to respond nimbly to changing commercial conditions. This flexibility is a feature, not a bug, of the statutory scheme, as the industries utilizing forced labor are a moving target and the techniques employed for circumventing import restrictions are not static. Since the law entered into force, CBP officials have stopped thousands of shipments from at least 10 countries because of links to the Uyghur Region and forced labor. These goods come from a variety of industries...

The role in this process played by civil society is to provide information and perspective to CBP and other government agencies tasked with enforcement responsibilities. To that end, we will continue to insist that, in situations of state-imposed forced labor, where widespread, systemic and egregious human rights violations are committed by state actors, it is a practical impossibility for a business to undertake credible due diligence on the ground or use its leverage to prevent, mitigate, or remedy abuse within its supply chains. Therefore audits, accreditation schemes, and/or supplier attestations should not be seen as sufficient evidence from importers that suppliers and/or sub-suppliers are not using forced labor...