Is lax legislation filling store shelves in Britain with forced labor?

Author: Freedom United

Year Published: 2025

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Both the EU and the US have put in place bans and strong laws to prevent goods made using forced labor from entering their markets. Conversely, a new report that finds the UK currently has no “enforceable legislation” to prevent forced labor goods from making it into the country onto the shelves. Thus, all the goods getting stopped in other locations can instead flood into the UK.

Direct from the Uyghur Region to a store near you

The Uyghur region of China has a well-earned global reputation for making and growing goods using forced labor. So much so, it’s assumed anything coming out of the region has forced labor somewhere in the supply chain. From tomatoes to solar panels, a wide range of goods are produced in the Uyghur Region. And due to a lack of data, it is extremely hard to know much about what goes on there. Especially when it comes to labor in manufacturing plants and farms.

Evan Fowler of Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC), told The Independent,

Not only has Beijing stopped publishing data that had previously been used by researchers to build a picture of what is happening, but the forced labor program has likely been expanded,

That expansion is due to a new scheme by Beijing to try and obfuscate the use of forced Uyghur labor. Under the new labor scheme, tens of thousands of people from the Uyghur Region are loaded onto buses. They are then shipped out and forced to work in eastern factories. And tellingly, a new report from the UK parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights (JCHR), underlined a stark fact. Unlike the US and the EU, cargo planes from the Uyghur Region are currently able to fly unhindered directly into the UK.