A London court has ordered that British officials must reconsider opening an inquiry into cotton imports purportedly produced by slave labor in China’s Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, permitting an appeal by a Uighur rights group.
The World Uyghur Congress, an international organization of exiled Uighur groups, filed a lawsuit on Thursday against Britain’s National Crime Agency (NCA) after it rejected to launch a criminal inquiry.
Rights groups and the US government accuse China of extensive abuses of Uighurs and other Muslim minorities in the western region of Xinjiang, which produces the large majority of China’s cotton.
Beijing vehemently rejects such abuses, and its embassy in Washington has previously condemned charges of forced labor as “nothing but a lie concocted by the US side in an attempt to wantonly suppress Chinese enterprises”.
“The Chinese government has made it very clear that the allegation of ‘forced labor’ in Xinjiang is nothing but an enormous lie propagated by anti-China elements to smear China,” a spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in London said.
In their legal case, the World Uyghur Congress claimed that the NCA neglected to investigate whether cotton from the region constitutes “criminal property”.
Last year, a judge at London’s High Court decided that there was “clear and undisputed evidence of instances of cotton being manufactured… by the use of detained and prison labor as well as forced labor.”
However, the legal appeal was dismissed on the basis that the British authorities’ approach to the law, which required a demonstrable relationship between accused criminality and a specific product, was correct.
The Court of Appeal rejected the decision, stating that “the question of whether to conduct an investigation… will be remitted to the NCA for reconsideration.”
