19
Examination of witnesses
Rahima Mahmut, Michael Rudin, and Professor Alexander Trautrims.
Q1 Chair: Welcome to the sixth hearing of the Joint Committee on Human Rights. It is the first we have taken in public in this Parliament, so we are grateful to those who are watching and listening and those who are physically present in Parliament for this session.
The Joint Committee on Human Rights comprises six members of the House of Commons and six members of the House of Lords. Its mandate is to examine matters relating to human rights within the United Kingdom, as well as scrutinising every government Bill for its compatibility with human rights.
The JCHR also allocates time for thematic inquiries, and the first of these is into forced labour and supply chains. Today, we have three distinguished panellists who will help the committee in examining the nature and scale of forced labour in British supply chains. It will look at our obligations under the Modern Slavery Act 2015 and the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002, and that flow from our international obligations ranging from the convention on the crime of genocide, to the commitments we have over the treatment of children under the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
Our witnesses to help us explore these serious questions today are Rahima Mahmut, UK director of the World Uyghur Congress, Michael Rudin, producer at BBC Eye Investigations, and Professor Alexander Trautrims, associate director of the University of Nottingham Rights Lab.
I will open with a general question, after which my parliamentary colleagues will come in. The first of those will be my distinguished colleague Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws. Could each of you tell us why you think Parliament should even be looking at the issue of forced labour in supply chains? Please delve deep.
Rahima Mahmut: Thank you very much for inviting me to speak at this hearing. Before I left in 2000, the forced labour situation was already well known there but not very well known in the international community. Since 2016, the Chinese Government have implemented genocidal policies, rounding up and detaining millions of Uighurs. The mounting evidence that the Chinese Government are using forced labour in many different industries, especially in the production of cotton, led the World Uyghur Congress to take legal action. We have evidence that forced labour is used in almost all products made in the region we call East Turkestan—that they are tainted by slave labour. Therefore, we believe that this is extremely important.
Chair: Can I turn now to Mr Rudin?
Michael Rudin: Thank you for inviting us; hopefully we will expose the scale and seriousness of the issue. It was very difficult to gather evidence, but as we did it became clearer and clearer to us that there is a real concern. We started to look into this in 2021 as a benchmark, after there had been a series of revelations, and we wanted to see what had happened since.
It was clear from 2020 that the US had enhanced its sanctions and had continued through the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act of 2021. There were also a series of raids by the Italian military police, the Carabinieri, and media reports.
The Foreign Affairs Committee took evidence from supermarkets stating that they were not going to import from Xinjiang, so we thought it was a good point to ask what has happened since. It is extremely difficult to gather evidence. That is one of the big problems in this area: gathering shipping data, getting people to talk and having the courage to talk. Lots of people did speak, and it took great courage to them for doing so, but it was extremely hard. Therefore, it is really important that you are now undertaking this inquiry to follow up and look into this.
Chair: We all have great admiration for the BBC Eye Investigations unit and much of the work you have done. Thank you for sharing this; I am sure people want to delve deeper. I will turn now to Professor Trautrims.
Professor Alexander Trautrims: We are talking about human suffering. We know that 50 million people in the world live in modern slavery, and many more live in conditions and have livelihoods that may not necessarily meet the legal threshold of slavery but are very bad.
From a business and supply chain angle, which is my area of expertise, there is an element of unfair competition against overseas competitors. If you are in a sector where labour costs are important for profitability, it is difficult to compete with someone who pays people zero. That is just a very simple business reality. In the UK itself, you see some organisations being innovative and progressive on this topic, but others are doing very little. There needs to be a slightly more level playing field to lift the bar and to get those into action who have, so far, not done much.
We can see from supply chain management practice that organisations that know their supply chains and suppliers better, and engage with them meaningfully, are more resilient to supply chain disruptions. We have seen this in several instances of global disruptions to supply chains: they know more about their supply chains, which makes them more responsive. So some elements of human rights due diligence also has the potential to lead to good supply chain management practice.
Chair: I will hand the floor now to Baroness Kennedy and, after she has asked her questions, we will turn to Mr Khan.
Q2 Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws: I, too, want to pay tribute to all three of you for the work that you have done in this space because what is happening to people in Xinjiang province is shocking. A lot of my work has related to Xinjiang province and the ways in which products coming from there are often the product of forced labour.
I should make a declaration that there is a centre for international justice in Sheffield Hallam University which bears my name: I do not run it, but it is a great honour that I am involved with it at a distance. One of their academics who will be known to you all, Laura Murphy, has done a lot of work on forced labour in Xinjiang province.
I want to come to you first, Rahima Mahmut. The World Uyghur Congress recently won a case against the National Crime Agency in the Court of Appeal in relation to its decision not to investigate whether cotton imported into the UK had been produced under forced labour in Xinjiang province. I would like you to tell us a bit about how that case got started, how you got it before the courts, and whether there is likely to be another stage—an appeal to the Supreme Court. Perhaps you can tell us about that case.
Rahima Mahmut: Thank you. Helena, and thank you for your work and your support throughout, but especially since 2016-17.
As I said earlier, millions were taken away after the mass detention reports. By late 2017-18, credible and systematic reports about these mass forced labour programmes—including from think tanks, NGOs, and independent investigations—all revealed that the Uighurs were being coerced into forced labour, especially in the cotton industry because of its scale of production. The region produces over 20% of the world’s cotton, and 85% of China’s cotton, making it a significant player in the global textile supply chain. This skill makes it almost impossible to separate the ethically produced cotton from that tainted by forced labour.
We had evidence of workers often being forcibly relocated for work and working inside after being detained in factories and camps. The Uighurs were also relocated to their workplace in cotton fields or factories under the guise of “poverty elevation” programmes which were, in reality, mechanisms of coercion and control.
We believe this is a violation of international law. We know that the UK does not have forced labour ban legislation despite the Modern Slavery Act. So, having spoken to Global Legal Action Network lawyers, we felt that we should appoint GLAN to help us seek legal action. We undertook the entire process and collected evidence through research, personal accounts and reports, as well as drone footage of the camps and the factories alongside these. I personally was the interpreter for the Australia Strategic Policy Institute report for several survivors who were forced to work in garment factories, for example. This gave us detailed evidence to present with the help of the lawyers at GLAN.
We lost the first court hearing last May. However, we won the second hearing against the National Crime Agency for not doing its job of halting tainted goods from entering the UK. That was a big win for us, especially people like myself who, for the last seven or eight years, have not been able to speak to family and siblings. In addition, on hearing these horrific accounts of abuse, torture and forced labour, we wanted to have some kind of accountability and needed to have action.
This win was, and is, extremely important. We thought we could use it as a legal tool to push for legislative change in the UK so that the products of forced labour cannot freely enter as they do now. We all know that goods coming into the UK are hardly checked whereas the United States, especially after the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, has been seizing containers and taking tangible actions.
Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws: That is one of the follow-ups I would like to ask you about. You spoke about there not being bans in this country in relation to places where the evidence is fairly overwhelming that there is forced labour: are you in favour of introducing the kind of American law that there is around import bans for specific commodities like cotton? It might apply to some other commodities too.
Rahima Mahmut: Yes. I strongly believe that it is the only and most effective way to stop these goods from entering the UK market and supply chains. We have seen the effect in the US, where many container goods are being stopped. The national agency in charge of investigating imports is working very hard there but here we simply do not have any such actions.
Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws: Have you had any indication as to whether the National Crime Agency might be appealing against the Court of Appeal decision in your favour?
Rahima Mahmut: No. In fact, it has asked for updated information and new evidence regarding forced labour, which our lawyers sent two months ago. We have been waiting for the next step.
Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws: I take my hat off to you for your endeavours in this because you have led the way on it. Securing a judgment from the Court of Appeal is a great step forward.
Chair: It may be that, after you have given our committee your evidence today, there will be some things you want to add. You are always welcome to send more in writing to us, perhaps outlining some other commodities coming into the country as well as cotton, and anything that your lawyers feel you will be able to share with the committee. We would love to see that. I would like to give the floor now to Mr Afzal Khan and, after him, we will hear from Lord Dholakia.
Q3 Afzal Khan: May I start by thanking all three of you for coming here today and giving evidence? I have been engaged with the Uighur situation for over 10 years now, since I was a member of the European Parliament and now here, and I have been following some of the prosecutions that have been happening to the Communist Party in China. I am pleased that you brought this case and have been successful. What do you think the impact of the case will be?
Rahima Mahmut: The judgment was historic for a number of reasons. First, globally. The court found that there was a striking consensus in the evidence that there were clear and widespread abuses in the cotton industry in the Uighur region involving human rights violations and exploitation of forced labour. We hope that a superior court in the UK will make a finding over what is happening to our people and that that will allow other Uighurs across the globe to access courts and have their legal systems accept what is happening to our people.
A second impact will be to take action to halt imports. In the UK, we are hoping that this case is the catalyst that the UK Government need to adopt new legislation banning forced labour imports, or legislation banning imports from the region. Due to legislative lacuna, we had to resort to criminal law and the Proceeds of Crime Act as there is currently no other law. The lack of a law in the UK is shocking. It is an outlier, as the EU just passed a forced labour regulation banning forced labour goods. In the US, there is the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, as I mentioned. We are hoping that the UK will adopt similar targeted legislation to bring it in line with other jurisdictions and stop the import of goods tainted by Uighur forced labour for good.
In terms of follow-up from our case, in November we wrote to the NCA after it asked us for updated evidence. We updated our evidence file and included, for example, the recent evidence of tomatoes coming from East Turkestan, as revealed by the BBC investigation. This shows that the issue is not only cotton but many other products entering the UK. It is now considering our updated evidence and we hope that it will launch a full investigation and begin to prosecute those responsible for importing goods tainted by forced labour. The Shein case that Stop Uyghur Genocide is pursuing is a good example.
Chair: You have raised the curtain for our next question to Mr Rudin from Lord Dholakia, and it involves tomatoes.
Q4 Lord Dholakia: What I want to know from you, Mike, is what initiated the investigation? Why look into tomato products and Xinjiang?
Michael Rudin: We had a huge team of people, some paid but a lot not, and one of the ones helping us was Alison Killing, a journalist at the Financial Times who won a Pulitzer Prize for her work in looking at the detention camps in Xinjiang. Her hunch was that, since there were much stricter controls in the US, Europe—with much less strict controls—had become a place where Chinese products would be dumped, as some would say, or sold at increasing levels. We started with that and as we looked through we obviously found things that were similar to what Rahima has been saying but regarding tomatoes. China produces about a third of the world’s tomatoes; roughly 80% comes from Xinjiang. Some is now being produced by Inner Mongolia, but most comes from Xinjiang.
I mentioned that in 2021 there was a series of things: there were reasons to suspect that one company we looked into, the Petti Group, had been mislabelling products and was potentially using Chinese tomatoes. It took a long time but, when we started to look into the shipping data, we found that it had been importing very large quantities from particular companies in Xinjiang.
That is where we started. It was a very long investigation after that and, as mentioned, the Foreign Affairs Committee looked into it. There were a lot of things around that time that made us wonder what has happened since, but it is very difficult to get information easily on this subject and that is a real concern. It is difficult to get shipping data or to get witnesses to talk, and the labelling is opaque. It is very difficult for the consumer and the legislators to know what is actually going on. There are modern slavery declarations but also a great lack of information.
Chair: We would like to delve a bit deeper, if we may. First Baroness Lawrence and then Lady Kennedy would like to follow up.
Q5 Baroness Lawrence of Clarendon: It sounds as if there were a lot of grey areas that you needed to look into. What resources did you require to collect the evidence in your investigation? Did you have testimony from witnesses, and did you use a satellite image to look at the area?
Michael Rudin: Yes. Our unit, the BBC Eye Investigations, is part of the World Service and, as such, was funded through it. It cost a lot of money as it was a long investigation, over a year and a half. Many people were not full-time during that period, but it was slowly gathering information. It took nearly a year to get the shipping data, for example. So there was a huge team of people drawing on lots of different experts and then talking to witnesses, gradually trying to get witnesses to gain their confidence so they could talk to us.
We spent a long time talking to witnesses. We spoke to about 14 who had witnessed or could talk about forced labour in the tomato fields. We talked to people about forced labour in other industries a lot more but it was quite difficult to focus specifically on tomatoes. To get people who were willing to talk was extremely difficult. We talked to a lot more than were in the programme, and we used a whole series of ways of gathering information such as documentary evidence which included company reports and government reports in China on what they say they are doing, and the supply chain data I mentioned.
We spent a long time gathering and looking at video evidence, trying to corroborate it. Trying to do that was a huge process and very difficult. We did some secret filming which gave us some very useful information. We did testing and then, right at the end of it, we still did two months’ engagement with the supermarkets. It is useful to point out that, in talking to the German company, Lidl, it told us that in 2023—this is the only admission we have had so far—for a short time another company, Giaguaro, used Chinese tomatoes. This is despite the fact that Lidl puts in its contract that it should not use them. So Lidl was slightly surprised when it had to admit to that. Neither would tell us which company in China had exported them; we suspect that it was COFCO Tunhe, which is state owned and has been sanctioned as such for forced labour. To sum up, it is a very long process involving lots of different ways of gathering evidence.
Baroness Lawrence of Clarendon: Were there any gaps in the law and/or regulation that you identified? When you were talking to the witnesses, were there any security staff around? I know that trying to speak to witnesses within that area is difficult. How did you manage to get them to open up to you? They would be frightened to identify themselves.
Michael Rudin: I do not want to go into too much detail as to how we did things, but the key is that it takes a long time for them to have trust in you for a very good reason. They feel very frightened, and Rahima can talk in terms of the threats that people get, which have been documented and noted in human rights reports by the UN and others. That is as much as I want to say.
There are a whole number of gaps. As mentioned, we found out that labelling is extremely vague in this country. I was slightly surprised as I did not know that much about it. There is no obligation to put down the source of the raw materials of a product, which means that it is very difficult for a consumer to know what they are buying. If a company chooses to put it on, they can still be very vague, so they could put something like, “Contains EU and non-EU tomatoes”, which basically means anywhere in the world. So it is meaningless. The supply chain data is very poor. Italy does not supply customs data, and China has stopped providing detailed customs data. We eventually found a way of getting it, but it took so long.
One of the key things we found is that there is a huge reliance from the supermarkets on what they call the audit trail. Professor Trautrims can probably talk about this but, basically, it is usually companies themselves self-declaring what has happened. That is absolutely fine if that company can be trusted. We looked at a case where a company has sometimes made false claims: what is that audit trail worth? Tesco gave evidence in the Business and Trade Committee on 7 January and said, with the case of Petti and the site we looked at, that there were—I think these were its words—“technical failings on that site”. It has admitted that and, for that reason, is going to stop using that site as a supplier.
So that reliance on audit is a problem, and related to that is the amount of testing that goes on. I understand that testing is expensive, but it is also a very useful tool. It is not definitive, and we made it clear in our investigation that we are not pretending our testing was definitive, but it is instructive. It is useful evidence. What we heard anecdotally—I cannot go into the details—is that some supermarkets had reduced the amount of testing they were doing generally. I noticed that, when asked in the Business and Trade Committee earlier this month, Tesco said it did not want to do more testing and that what it wanted to rely on was the audit declaration. That shows where supermarkets want to go; they want to rely less on testing and more on the audits, but there is a problem with that.
The last thing is what I call the cat-and-mouse game that is going on, which is what US customs at the Port of Newark told us when the team—not me—went there. There are much stricter controls in the US, but still companies try to find ways to get round them. If you have stricter regulations in the US, and you have stricter regulations in the EU, what impact does that have on the UK? Anti-Slavery International has said that it thinks the UK will become more of a target once those regulations come in. There are so many things there, but an awful lot of work needs to be done to tighten this up.
Baroness Lawrence of Clarendon: Do you think the British Government need to be more stringent where the law is concerned? Is there something within the law that could assist when those goods are being imported?
Michael Rudin: Yes. In the US, where there is a much simpler regulation, it is clearer because there is a presumption: anything coming in from Xinjiang is assumed to have forced labour in it. Having looked at it, and I am not an expert, there seems good reason to have that presumption. To go into a tiny amount of detail, there are lots of cases where a company like Petti will say that it used another company which had self-declared as a Chinese company that does not have a problem with forced labour or human rights concerns. That is great but, according to our evidence, it turns out that it is just a subsidiary of another company which is wholly owned by the XPCC: a paramilitary organisation sanctioned by the US for forced labour. It is much simpler when you have stricter and clearer legislation.
Chair: We are going to go back to Lady Kennedy for a moment and then we will hear from Mr Swallow.
Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws: These are familiar stories, and it is wonderful to hear because it is important for those who are watching external to Parliament to know what goes on. One of the problems we have, in my experience of this work, is that the best investigations involve being able to access data that is basically held by Governments, such as the shipping data you were talking about. How hellish it was for you to actually access that, and how long it took. It sounded like it took almost a year to get that data. Other places, such as the US, are much better at keeping this sort of data, so it is much easier to conduct investigations there. Why are we so bad? What could be done around that shipping data issue?
Michael Rudin: It is an international issue so, obviously, it is for Governments to try and push other Governments to do things. For example, Italy is an EU country and could be persuaded by the EU and at an intergovernmental level to publish detailed customs data which would help tracking. Most of the tomatoes that come into this country come via Italy so that would be a simple way, but it would need to be on a government level.
Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws: A lot of the work that has been conducted has had to rely on open source material, and data now is the great source. Our professor will be able to tell us about this, but we have to rely on the United States because it holds this data and you can access it as a researcher looking at supply chains. It seems to me that we are hopeless about this here.
Michael Rudin: It is an important point, and transparency is at the heart of this.
Chair: This moves us on very neatly into the next section, which is to Professor Trautrims. I am going to invite Mr Swallow to begin the questioning on this, and then we will turn to sector best practice and attitudes where we will hear from Mr Alex Sobel.
Q6 Peter Swallow: It is important to think about how businesses respond to the fantastic work that we have been hearing about. I wanted to ask about the likely impact on supply chain management from the Court of Appeal judgment against the NCA and the BBC World Service investigation: has it affected the way the UK supply chains are being managed in reality?
Professor Alexander Trautrims: Yes and no. The NCA judgment was mainly noticed by people who are already interested in modern slavery. My experience—certainly when the US tightened its enforcement of the import bans—is that it was the enforcement action that really raised attention. As a supply chain manager, you notice if suddenly your containers are not arriving. It is more tangible than a judgment where we have not yet seen enforcement action so is a little vague in terms of what the practical impact is. However, it created a huge change in making sure that it is not just an upstream supply chain; that there is a responsibility along the entire supply chain and it does not stop at some point in-between.
As my colleague from the BBC mentioned, there is a question around the evidential threshold: are we saying we need to have 100% court robust evidence to stop goods from entering the UK? Do we use something else? What is an unacceptable level of risk? Corporations do not have the resources to undertake fantastic investigations across everything they source, so they have to prioritise areas of a higher risk and then undertake more enhanced due diligence in those areas. However, that due diligence will also, to a large extent, rely on civil society doing groundwork and raising that information. It is then for organisations to ask, “Is this risk is acceptable?” There would also be a similar question for border enforcement: do we say that an unacceptable high risk is enough to stop goods from entering, or do we have a very high evidential threshold that, with all the opaqueness of global supply chains, would be very difficult to achieve?
Chair: Mr Sobel, over to you.
Alex Sobel: I do quite a lot of work around transparent supply chains, particularly around things like cocoa and palm oil. When I was on the Environmental Audit Committee, I did work around cotton. In your view, what are the likely impacts for supply chain management in the UK stemming from the Court of Appeal judgment against the National Crime Agency?
Professor Alexander Trautrims: For me, it would be all about the enforcement action. How is this going to look in practice? We have clearly run out of roads with the Modern Slavery Act because there is already no enforcement for corporations, so is there going to be an effective enforcement mechanism that is going to come into place and then it will be noticed? It just remains an abstract risk where we cannot really understand how that impacts supply chains yet.
If it is strictly enforced, it could be quite a big changer in terms of organisations wanting to understand their supply chains in more detail and potentially shortening their supply chains. Why would you sign a contract with a company that does not grow a single tomato? Why do you have these shell companies in your trade network? Can you shorten that? Can you actually make it easier for yourself to monitor these supply chains?
Some of the effort you mentioned could be shared among companies operating in the same industry. For example, the fantastic organisation, Electronics Watch, organised that for public procurement buyers in the electronics sector so that not everybody has to do it themselves. It is bringing these organisations and their buying power together to then be much more effective in terms of changing realities on the ground.
Q7 Alex Sobel: You just gave that example from Electronics Watch, but maybe more broadly, what do businesses operating in the UK typically do to monitor supply chains for risk of forced labour, and what does best practice look like? You might have just covered that.
Professor Alexander Trautrims: There is a lot of audit bashing—rightly so, because there is a lot of meaningless auditing—but auditing can also be used in good ways of identifying nonconformities. Like you said, that usually only works if you have a trusted relationship with that supplier and you have a common understanding about what this contract you have signed is about. Generally, the more progressive organisations would look for longer-term contracts: spot buying of commodities is very high risk there whereas longer-term contractual relationships with suppliers bring you the ability to build their trust and understand the supply chain more.
Not every supply market has that level of maturity. As organisations source from all over the world, your suppliers will have a different level of capability and what you can expect from them, and you need some sort of tailored approach. You want them to be ambitious and to improve, but you need to be careful that you do not end up with no supplier at all. A lot of the more advanced organisations are actively reaching out to civil society organisations: they are not scared of civil society organisations; they want to know the information they hold, the on-the-ground intelligence. It takes a good amount of confidence to be able to do that: to reach out to stakeholders and ask them to tell you what is potentially wrong with your supply chain.
Great examples are businesses that publish all their suppliers as far as they know them—certainly tier 1—to actually say, “Tell me if there’s a problem”, really making that as transparent as possible. They will prioritise and actively analyse risks and they will be responsive because risks shift all the time. When we look at the Ukraine invasion, suddenly a major risk arose in the middle of Europe and the more progressive organisations would have been proactively looking into it—what are we sourcing from there? Who are the people working there?—whereas less progressive organisations would have just been hanging back and waiting until the BBC told them.
Alex Sobel: That obviously covered best practice, but then you went to people who may be less motivated. Is there enough motivation for supply chain managers to implement best practice in the system? For example, is the demand—from clients, consumers and firms—enough for forced labour to be removed or managed, or do you think there needs to be additional motivation?
Professor Alexander Trautrims: There needs to be additional motivation. Certainly, in the supply chain management community there is a huge variation depending on which industry sector you are in and whether you have a brand that can potentially be damaged or not. There are very different informal normative frameworks between different industry sectors.
From my own experience, if you walk into a procurement department and people just have a lowest-cost attitude instead of best value, you know they will have problems in terms of exploitation. If you purely think about lowest cost now, that will always drive you to the lowest possible price, which brings you to the suppliers that treat their workers worse.
Alex Sobel: One way of raising the floor is through standards. The BSI have a standard of kitemark, which provides guidance for organisations to address the risks of modern slavery. That is obviously welcome, but do you think there has been enough uptake of the BSI standard since it was published, or do you think more should be done to get companies to take it up?
Professor Alexander Trautrims: There is always more. We have had more than 2,000 downloads so far from very different user groups. The intention was also to provide organisations with what we already knew. In 2015, when the UK Modern Slavery Act came, we had relatively little advice for businesses that came to people like me and others and said, “What do you actually want me to do?” We had relatively little knowledge about what was effective against modern slavery in the supply chains.
That was 10 years ago. There has been a phenomenal amount of research and activism, not just in the UK but across the world since then. We have many more solutions and tangible advice as to what we want organisations to do. The Modern Slavery Act provided a very safe space where organisations could try to do things because there was not really any enforcement, but that is not strong enough any more. We now have solutions and a good amount of knowledge of what works, so this is the time when we can raise the bar and ask organisations to do more about their supply chains.
I generally think one should never provide a kitemark saying, “This product is 100% slavery-free.” It is difficult to guarantee that, but you can give a kitemark saying, “I think this organisation has good practices in place; it’s taking this topic seriously and takes meaningful action”.
Chair: On BSI and ISO, if you have some specific recommendations that you would like the committee to consider—we could incorporate them in our findings and recommendations to the Government at the end, to try to bring a notable improvement on what you just expressed about the feelgood area around the 2015 legislation—that would be helpful to us. Perhaps you could write to us subsequently, Professor.
Q8 Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws: I was interested in following up the fact that many companies use lawyers to fill in the form that says, “We’ve made the appropriate inquiries and so on, and the supply chain is clean”. When the Modern Slavery Act 2015 was introduced, lots of law firms immediately saw a new area of potential business and set up business and human rights entities inside their law firms. Have you ever done a case study on whether the law firms go into depth in trying to find out more about the supply chains and keeping abreast of this? What do the law firms do?
Professor Alexander Trautrims: I have never done a study into law firms but, when you start working with an organisation, one can instantly notice which corporate function owns the topic of modern slavery. When it is the compliance function, it gets very compliancy: “Have we spoken to all our suppliers? Have they all self-certified?” If you speak to a risk management community or supply chain management community, it will usually be more about the engagement.
That is certainly something I have seen with the German supply chain due diligence law, where there is a way too great emphasis—certainly in business practice—on, “Has every supplier ticked the box? Have you spoken to every supplier?” That is quite dangerous in the sense that that is not what we want them to do; we want them to take meaningful action. People are very much focusing on whether everything is documented. I do not think that was the intention of the German lawmakers at all, but it seems law firms and consultants discovering this as a business area has scared businesses and they can therefore sell more compliance solutions. We have to be careful of how we implement these topics. I have also seen a large number of very motivated lawyers who really want this to be meaningful and effective.
Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws: There are lawyers for whom it is an issue of interest, and there are law firms that are basically going through this box-ticking exercise that you have described as being something you came across in Germany. The box-ticking thing is problematic, is it not? You are relying on people telling you the truth about the fact that they have checked things out. The law firms are having to rely upon checking with people and asking, “Have you made sure the supply chain is not using forced labour?” And they will say, "Yes, of course we have”.
Professor Alexander Trautrims: Exactly. It depends how meaningful that engagement is. You would be better advised to spend more quality time with your biggest and highest-risk suppliers than trying to cover everyone in a very shallow, tick-box way.
Baroness Lawrence of Clarendon: Just following on from when you were talking about modern slavery: it seems like we have got to a level but it needs to be upped a bit now. What would you suggest needs to change in order to refresh around modern slavery?
Professor Alexander Trautrims: It would be a combination of the international legislative dynamics that we have seen. An import ban in combination with a due diligence obligation for organisations of a certain level of resource would be a good idea.
There is also a slightly tricky bit in the UK’s largely using disclosure and reporting as a tool. If you are reporting something openly and transparently in the UK, that creates an obligation in another jurisdiction because that is then information that that jurisdiction expects you to use for your due diligence. Harmonisation with our biggest trade partners would be a good idea as well.
Chair: We will have a chance to talk further about recommendations on the final question, and I will bring Ms Mahmut in then as well, if I may, to build on what you have just said, Professor.
Q9 Peter Swallow: Mr Rudin, we just heard from Professor Trautrims that sometimes when corporations are not following best practice they hang back and wait for the BBC to tell them there is a problem. I just wanted to ask, following on from your fantastic documentary, what has been the reaction of corporations to your findings? I know at the end of the documentary you charted some reactions and, if I may say, inaction that happened as a response. I wondered if there had been any follow-up since and whether any changes had been made by corporations.
Michael Rudin: All the supermarkets said they took the allegations seriously and carried out internal investigations following it. They all said they found no evidence of Chinese tomatoes, apart from the example that I gave of Lidl. Many disputed our methodology and the testing we used, and some did their own testing, which came up with a different conclusion.
Peter Swallow: Were they transparent about that test?
Michael Rudin: Yes. Some—not all—have given us their testing and we have looked at it. I am not a scientist, but I can go into it and make an argument as to why that is the case. The most significant one—as I have already mentioned—is Tesco admitting that Petti, this main supplier that we looked at, had technical failings so it had decided to stop using it. Following our long discussion with it in the run-up to publication, it initially said it was stopping sourcing from Xinjiang, and I said, “Well, how can you ensure that you’re going to stop it from Xinjiang?” And it then said, “Well, it’s China then; we’re not importing from China at all”, and that it would enhance its human rights and workers’ rights compliance afterwards. That has been the response. It is difficult for a major supermarket to have evidence that comes like this and we do not make allegations like this lightly; we understand it is difficult and awkward for a company.
Chair: If we may, we will go back to Professor Trautrims. You have already had some questions, but perhaps you can build on what you have already said. We are going to hear from Lady Kennedy and Mr Swallow again about both the voluntary and mandatory approaches: which works, which does not, and where we should be doing more.
Q10 Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws: I am going to summarise what has already come out in the evidence and what you have already spoken about, as has Rahima and indeed Mike. There is the voluntary system introduced by Britain in the Modern Slavery Act, which was, “We are relying on you to self-regulate—that you will make these inquiries yourself, and fill in your annual report with what you have done to make sure you have clean supply chains”. The sense one is getting is that that is not always working. I got the impression from what you said—tell me if it is right or not—that you think there really is a need for a next stage, which is to actually have stronger legislation in which there have to be some steps taken if people do not have supply chains that are clean.
Professor Alexander Trautrims: That is absolutely correct. Like I said, the Modern Slavery Act created a great learning space for industry by being low on enforcement, but we now have that learning.
Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws: We will get there in the end, but you are saying we should follow the Americans’ route of an import ban? Certainly that is what Rahima has mentioned; do you agree with that?
Professor Alexander Trautrims: Absolutely, and evidential threshold will be a big question. There is also a question about which countries can actually enforce that. The US is obviously a large country, well-resourced in its enforcement structures. When you look at much smaller countries around the world, they would struggle to have that level of enforcement, but the UK is certainly a big enough economy and country to do that.
There is also an important area around evidence sharing that I hear quite often. With its level of resources, the US is also able to gather evidence and it would be good to have some sort of international mechanism—certainly, for example, around the Five Eyes and so on—to share that evidence. That would then automatically also trigger import bans, potentially in the UK, Canada, and other countries that have such legislative mechanisms, without necessarily having the resource level in the enforcement infrastructure to collate evidence.
Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws: You have spoken about the importance—as you see it—of a due diligence obligation, which is a very interesting suggestion; I have not heard that being spelled out in quite that way before. What are the weaknesses in the American system? At the moment we keep raising it as having much more transparent shipping, documentation, data being much more available, and you can get to customs data much more readily than you can here or in Europe. But what are the downsides of the American system?
Chair: And the EU as well, if you would.
Professor Alexander Trautrims: The downside is very clearly that it ignores that there is forced labour in the United States itself; it just creates a narrative of this being a faraway problem in other places of the world, whereas it is also in the US. That is something we have to be quite careful of because it creates a psychological distance for people to say, “This is an overseas problem.”
I hear a lot from colleagues in developing countries about the perception of a non-tariff trade barrier through these pieces of legislation. We can probably observe that enforcement, certainly in the US, is more often used in areas where there is a domestic competitor. There is cotton production in the US, and we have to be careful in working with partners around the world—particularly in the developing world—that this is not seen as trying to keep them away from our markets and stopping them from developing their economies, but is genuinely about raising standards on human rights.
Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws: And improving conditions?
Professor Alexander Trautrims: Yes.
Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws: What is the problem in Europe?
Professor Alexander Trautrims: Good question. The learning there in relation to human rights due diligence is in a much earlier stage than in the UK, where we have had the Modern Slavery Act since 2015. In Europe, that learning curve is a little later. What works quite well there is that you owe the effort to undertake due diligence, undertake action if you find risks, and then prioritise; so you do not necessarily owe the outcome but you could also criticise that. It would still allow you to potentially work with high-risk supply chains and high-risk suppliers because you have undertaken due diligence. You are implementing something but it may not quite yet be at the level where you would want it to be.
Q11 Peter Swallow: If I can go back to you, Ms Mahmut: I know you have already touched on this in your earlier answers, but I do not know whether you wanted to add anything, particularly having heard from our other experts. What do you think could be done to improve the UK’s approach to regulation and enforcement of forced labour in supply chains?
Rahima Mahmut: I mentioned earlier the reason we took the National Crime Agency to court: we feel the Modern Slavery Act 2015 simply does not really have any power. Therefore, we wanted, through a High Court judgment, to be able to have legislation for import bans and fines, for example, for companies not really complying with the legislation and restrictions.
I want to also emphasise some facts: China operates the world’s largest contemporary system of state-imposed forced labour in the Uighur region. Up to 2.5 million Uighurs and members of other ethnic groups are at risk of forced labour, and Uighurs and other ethnic groups cannot say no when the state comes to them. There are so many challenges for any kind of due diligence to operate within the region. For example, there is no transparency, and even the basic co-operation data is not accessible from outside. This is the real difficulty that a lot of researchers have been facing, as well as the fact that China has been shutting down audit firms, and a government investigation in due diligence investigations.
It also has anti-espionage regulations restricting firms from revealing their suppliers and from being able to carry out any kind of due diligence work. Yet, if we just rely on the Modern Slavery Act and asking companies just to tick boxes, we are allowing lies without any evidence for ticking the boxes.
I also want to inform the committee that the Chinese Government are not only benefiting from the forced labour, profiting from millions of my people—their blood and sweat—but they are also enabling their genocidal policies through this. One benefit is to easily assimilate Uighur into Han-defined Chinese, embracing Xi Jinping’s thought. Once you are under forced labour, you are in captivity; you have no rights to really say no to anything. Alongside forced labour, they are forced to take re-education, which is Xi Jinping’s thoughts, anti-religion education, adopting Han culture, cultural norms and ideologies, and forgetting their religion. But most importantly, moving Uighurs away from their own community is enabling its genocidal policy to completely erase the culture, language, and so on.
Chair: Of course, the House of Commons voted to say there is a genocide under way in Xinjiang. Presumably, from what you are saying to us, you do not think we meet the obligations we have under the 1948 convention on the crime of genocide to act in those circumstances.
We are going to move on to procurement and we will hear from Mr Sobel and from Sir Desmond Swayne, but I just want to ask the panel this before we move on. There have been reports recently about Shein and the role it plays in the massive fashion industry. Have you had any direct discussions with Shein at all about its role in bringing goods into this country that may have been made by slave labour?
Also, there have been reports about local airports like Bournemouth being used to bring in consignments directly from Xinjiang. You mentioned the National Crime Agency, but can I ask you about what Border Force has done? The reports say it has not looked at any of those consignments coming into the country at all. Can you share any information with the committee today, and if not, perhaps you could write to us afterwards if that is the case.
Rahima Mahmut: As far as I know, there is no action. We are still waiting for the National Crime Agency—after we submitted further information—to declare that it will carry out an investigation. That is all I can tell you now.
Professor Alexander Trautrims: I am not involved in any work around regional airports and the logistics networks there. I also had absolutely no interaction with Shein, and the evidence that it gave is probably quite telling in terms of everything we raised earlier about what we want organisations to do—being transparent and open about their problems and telling us what they are doing to improve it. There certainly seems to be a cultural problem in that organisation’s modern slavery response.
Michael Rudin: I cannot add anything. I am afraid our investigation is about tomatoes, and that is what I know something about.
Q12 Alex Sobel: The committee has had some evidence that there are significant risks in public procurement from forced labour. Professor Trautrims, do you think establishing strict requirements in public procurement can have an impact in the private sector? For example, if there is a specific level of due diligence or the need to adopt standards for suppliers to submit a tender for public procurement contracts, will this have an effect on the sector? Will it raise the general level of compliance in terms of supply chains?
Professor Alexander Trautrims: Absolutely, in particular when you think of sectors where public procurement is the biggest customer—for example, the NHS healthcare system; when you look at infrastructure, HS2 was really raising standards in what it expected its supply chain partners to deliver; and defence, where the only customer is really Government. In those industries, if one single customer is not interested and not asking critical questions, it is unlikely that we would see any change in those.
We teach private sector procurement in business schools, but we teach public procurement in law schools, strangely enough; we are just trying to cross over on some things. They operate in a much more compliance-based framework because public procurement is based in law. There is certainly a bit of catching up in public procurement in terms of managing a supply chain; not just buying something and signing a contract but checking up on it. Who is checking up that the contract is being adhered to? We often see more active supply chain management, which public procurement finds more difficult than some private sector counterparts.
Alex Sobel: You seemed to intimate that there are different standards among different departments or government projects in terms of forced labour and supply chains. Is that accurate?
Professor Alexander Trautrims: Was it the Health and Social Care Act that had a clear mandate? From speaking to NHS procurement people, that empowered them to do things in the organisation, and that is what they needed in their mandate.
Chair: I should declare an interest: I was involved in the amendment that was successful to that legislation to do precisely that.
Can I just press further before turning to Sir Desmond and ask again about solar panels? There is a vast amount of procurement going on at the moment and there will be a great deal more under the Great British Energy Bill. We are told that many of these are being manufactured in Xinjiang. Can you tell us anything about that, Professor?
Professor Alexander Trautrims: I was not involved in that particular project; James Cockayne—a researcher at the Rights Lab—did that work. I would probably have to come back with some more detail in a written form. I certainly know from people I have worked with in the construction sector that there are some ethical trade-offs in terms of the requirement to deliver an energy transition, and practitioners are facing some difficult challenges in that.
Chair: We would be very interested to see that further written evidence, so thank you. The floor is now Sir Desmond’s.
Q13 Sir Desmond Swayne: Professor, you mentioned the NHS a few moments ago: First, we are told that as much as a fifth of supply contracts to the NHS are in danger of involving forced labour. What is it particularly about the public sector, or is there something about the public sector, that makes it more prone than the private sector? Secondly, will the Procurement Act 2023 make a difference?
Professor Alexander Trautrims: I am not sure if the public sector is more prone per se, but I mention some of the way procurement works in the NHS and the kind of products procured. I did a project around medical gloves that were procured; that was purely on a lowest-cost basis in quarterly contractual tenders, so no long-term relationships. That was very different, for example, from Sweden, where public procurement has been very involved in that particular sector in looking into those supply chains. It took a very different approach.
I was speaking earlier about good practice in terms of supply chain management: having longer-term contracts, understanding the supply and actually sharing that cultural piece and helping them to understand what you want them to deliver, rather than just having a tender requirement, ticking a box and signing the thing. As far as I understand, there is quite a lot of work going on around the sustainability requirements in NHS procurement at the moment.
Sir Desmond Swayne: Do you have a view on whether the Procurement Act 2023 is going to be effective?
Professor Alexander Trautrims: I do not know that Act in enough detail to give you a robust enough response here.
Q14 Chair: That, again, would be a very important piece of evidence to us, and it would help Sir Desmond and all the committee if you could let us have something in writing about that.
Well, the panel may be relieved to know that we are coming to the end of this session, but I know how much we have got from it, and thank you very much for what you have given us. I have one last question: if you put yourself into the position of the committee and the recommendations we will be making to the Government about how they can do more to stop the use of slave labour, forced labour within the supply chains, of goods that are sold to the ordinary British people without—as we heard from Mike earlier on—identification of those goods, where they come from, who produced them, and what the risks may be, what would be your recommendations? Can you just give us a couple of examples? What would be top of your list? Perhaps, Professor, if you could go first and we will give the last word to Rahima Mahmut?
Professor Alexander Trautrims: Human rights due diligence, import bans, and encouraging businesses and creating a culture where they come together and work on this as a shared problem that they are all facing together. Many businesses already do, but they need that encouragement also internally to say, “This is what we want, this is what we need”.
Rahima Mahmut: As I mentioned, tougher legislation is extremely important. I mention the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. If the UK could have a similar Act, it would be very beneficial, as well as Magnitsky-style sanctions against the officials on the list who are involved in these atrocities, especially forced labour practice in the supply chain in the Xinjiang region and China.
Chair: Would you provide that list to the committee as something that we can include in our evidence?
Rahima Mahmut: Yes, we will submit some written evidence.
Chair: Thank you, Ms Mahmut, and thank you, Professor Trautrims and Mr Rudin, for the evidence you have given us today; it will help us enormously in what you all said at the outset is a very important inquiry. On behalf of the committee, may I thank you for being with us? I draw this session to a conclusion.
