Japanese lawmakers and Uyghur activists gathered on February 25 at an occasion hosted by the Japan Uyghur Association in Tokyo to deal with the Chinese authorities’s atrocity crimes within the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.
“It’s important to send a big message to the world” concerning the Chinese authorities’s rights abuses in opposition to Uyghurs, mentioned Keiji Furuya, a senior lawmaker for the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, in his opening remarks. Furuya, chairperson of the Japan Uyghur Parliamentary Association, mentioned final November that his caucus would draft a Japanese model of the United States Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act.
Human Rights Watch, in a February 18 letter to the Japan Uyghur Parliamentary Association, underscored that import restrictions focusing on state-imposed compelled labor are essential for growing strain on the Chinese authorities to finish abusive labor practices in Xinjiang and past.
Human Rights Watch beneficial that Japan ought to goal any world area with a excessive threat of state-imposed compelled labor. The regulation also needs to require firms in search of to import at-risk merchandise to display {that a} product was not produced by way of compelled labor.
Since 2016, Chinese authorities have detained as much as 1,000,000 Uyghurs and different Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang’s political reeducation camps, sentenced a half-million to jail with out due course of, and subjected many to torture, compelled disappearance, mass surveillance, cultural and non secular persecution, household separation, and compelled labor. State-imposed compelled labor in Xinjiang impacts world provide chains, together with in Japan, in sectors together with automotive, photo voltaic panels, attire, seafood, agricultural merchandise, and crucial minerals.
The Japanese authorities has lengthy been crucial of Beijing’s abuses in opposition to Uyghurs. In 2024, throughout China’s fourth Universal Periodic Review (UPR) on the United Nations Human Rights Council, in addition to throughout a 2025 bilateral assembly with President Xi Jinping, Japan expressed concern about China’s human rights scenario, together with in Xinjiang.
Import restrictions and different company accountability legal guidelines, such because the European Union’s company sustainability due diligence directive, are important to combine human rights with financial insurance policies that shield client and native industries from “low rights” financial fashions in China and past.
Source: Human Rights Watch