A UN investigator says contemporary forms of slavery are widely practiced around the world, including forced labor for China's Uyghur minority, bonded labour for the lowest caste Dalits in South Asia, and domestic servitude in Gulf countries, Brazil and Colombia.
Human Rights Council Special Rapporteur Tomoya Obokat adds that traditional enslavement, especially of minorities, is found in Mauritania, Mali and Niger in Africa's Sahel region.
He said in a report to the UN General Assembly circulated Wednesday that child labour — another contemporary form of slavery — exists in all regions of the world, including its worst forms. “In Asia and the Pacific, the Middle East, the Americas and Europe, between 4 and 6 percent of children are said to be in child labour, and the percentage is much higher in Africa (21.6 per cent), with the highest rate in sub-Saharan Africa (23.9 per cent),” he said.
His conclusion about Uyghurs in China's northwestern province of Xinjiang follows a US ban imposed last December on imports from the region unless businesses can prove items are made without forced labour. There have been many claims China engages in systemic and widespread abuse of ethnic and religious minorities in its western region.
China's Foreign Ministry sharply criticized that finding by Okobata, who is a Japanese scholar and professor of international law and human rights at Keele University in England.
In the report, Okobata said that based on an independent assessment of available information from many sources, including victims and government accounts, he “regards it as reasonable to conclude that forced labor among Uyghur, Kazakh and other ethnic minorities in sectors such as agriculture and manufacturing has been occurring in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China.”
He cited two systems used by China — the detention of minorities for vocational skills education and training followed by work placement, and a poverty alleviation through labour program in which surplus rural labourers are transferred to other work. He said labour transfer is also practiced in Tibet where farmers, herders and other rural workers are transferred into low-skilled and low-paid employment.
While these programs may create jobs and income as the government claims, Obokata said in many cases the work is involuntary and workers are subject to excessive surveillance, abusive living and working conditions, restricted movements, threats, physical or sexual violence, and other inhuman or degrading treatment.
“Some instances may amount to enslavement as a crime against humanity, meriting a further independent analysis,” he said. China's Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin accused Obokata of choosing “to believe in lies and disinformation about Xinjiang spread by the US and some other Western countries and anti-China forces.”
He also accused Obokata of abusing his authority as a special investigator to “smear and denigrate China and serve as a political tool for anti-China forces.”
He accused unnamed “forces” of fabricating disinformation on forced labour “to undermine Xinjiang's prosperity and stability and contain China's development and revitalization.”“China strongly condemns this,” Wang said. “There has never been `forced labor' in Xinjiang.”
He said China protects the rights and interests of workers from all ethnic groups to seek employment, participate in economic and social life, “and to share the dividends of socioeconomic progress.”
Obokata said minorities are also subjected to forced labour in Latin America, pointing to rural areas of Brazil, including the Amazon, where “slavery is intricately linked with economic activities that are causing environmental devastation, including illegal logging and mining."