Subcommittee on International Human Rights Committee on July 21st, 2020

[Amy Lehr]

Our interviews were focused primarily on the issues around forced labour, but we did get a sense of the larger picture. We also talked to them about some of the conditions of detainment. The people we talked to were just ordinary people. They weren't all Uighur. They were from different ethnic groups that were Muslim. They were mothers and fathers, normal people who had been just swept up and detained, sometimes in multiple detention facilities. Sometimes they were severely physically abused, depending on the facility they were in. Sometimes they were just hit with wooden sticks when their Mandarin was wrong, or were not allowed to go to the bathroom without a guard and things like that. It was just demeaning and exhausting and frightening. Then they were put into forced labour.

Again, we were really focused on that element. We learned that they were working for either no income or pay that in the course of a year they should have been paid in a month. They were constantly guarded. They were living in dormitories and with guards. They were going on buses with guards to the factories every day. There was policing of the factories, and security. They had no idea when this would end, or how it would end. All their devices were monitored.

In terms of that level of state control and surveillance, we've never seen anything like it in the history of the world.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

Thank you.

We'll go to Ms. McPherson for seven minutes.

[Heather McPherson, NDP, Edmonton Strathcona, AB]

Thank you very much for your testimony today. This is very interesting.

I have questions for all three of you, but I think I'll start with Ms. Lehr.

You talked a lot about the forced labour, and certainly I know we unfortunately cut you off a bit during your introductory comments. I'd like to give you a little space for that. One of the areas that you talked about was poverty alleviation, and that it was being used as an excuse. Could you talk about that a bit more for me, please?

[Amy Lehr]

Yes, I'm happy to do that.

What we know about poverty alleviation is taken mostly from public documents, but a little bit is based on our interviews as well. It's a program which, on its face, sounds quite benign, but it's the idea of, with all of these minorities who are backwards and poor, living in rural areas, moving them into factory jobs, with the assumption being that that's what they want. There are quotas, so government officials are expected to meet certain quotas.

Typically, as a human rights lawyer, I would say when quotas like this are imposed and there are punishments for not meeting them, you end up with some really bad situations. In this case we're concerned that people are being forced to be part of poverty alleviation, transferred to work, when they don't want to, because the government officials are trying to meet their quotas.

Some of this was confirmed through our interviews. We weren't looking at the time for people who had been in poverty alleviation programming, but we happened to talk to people who had been working side by side with people who were part of the program and had been transferred to factories. It was just like the former detainees were being paid, again, minimum wage for a month over the the course of a year, having to live in dormitories separated from their family, watched at all times, not there by choice. They'd been told that if they didn't engage in this programming and go to work, they would be sent to a detention centre.

[Heather McPherson, NDP, Edmonton Strathcona, AB]

I have a very quick follow-up on that. When they are sent to poverty alleviation...or into this forced labour, or into these dormitories, their children are left behind, I'm assuming. What do you know about the results of that?

[Amy Lehr]

I believe that Adrian Zenz, who may have testified for you already, has written more about this.

One of the really key concerns is that all these children are being left with no caretakers, because villages apparently in some areas are almost empty. There's no one to watch them and they become wards of the state and are sent to state-run schools.

[Heather McPherson, NDP, Edmonton Strathcona, AB]

I have one last question for you before I move on.

You talked a bit about making sure that we're encouraging companies to explore their supply chains. That seems to me like a nice idea that they would do that of their own volition, which may not actually be the case in some multinational corporations. What are some of the steps we could take to maybe be a little more stern than encouraging?

[Amy Lehr]

A fairly soft approach is to require reporting on how they conduct the due diligence on their supply chains, how they report that, what was it, and did they find linkages to Xinjiang. There could be just a pure transparency requirement, and that alone may have an influence, because those companies won't want to say that they found Xinjiang buried in their supply chain. In the U.S. we have the Tariff Act, and that can be used to seize goods produced anywhere in the supply chain with forced labour. In the U.S. that is a pretty powerful tool. I'm not aware of Canada having the same tool, but I was suggesting that, in general, given your government's strong stance against forced labour, it might be worth considering a measure like that.

Those would be some of the ways you could at least start to impose extrication on companies, and you could ratchet it up from there if they're not responding.

[Heather McPherson, NDP, Edmonton Strathcona, AB]

Excellent.

I might ask Dr. Anderson a quick question as well.

You spoke a bit about the resource extraction in the area. I'm assuming that there is evidence of forced labour being used with some of this resource extraction. Perhaps you could talk about that, and maybe about whether or not there are Canadian or international companies that are also implicated in this resource extraction that's happening in the area.

[Dr. Elise Anderson]

Yes, we do know of a long history of international corporations. I'm not totally certain about Canadian corporations in particular, but international corporations. One example is coal and other parts of the energy sector, and so forth.

Most of the forced labour we're seeing in the current campaign, however, is connected to these industries that Ms. Lehr has already mentioned. Textiles, electronics, agriculture, food production, tomatoes and even ketchup, which are making their way around the world, are directly involved, not even just implicated, in these forced labour schemes. We're seeing a lot of different things.

However, with this resource extraction that I talked about, that is linked really closely to a form of settler colonialism that has only been increasing in the region since the CCP came into power. It is deeply tied to the transfer of non-Uighur or non-Kazakh, non-Kyrgyz, non-indigenous peoples from outside the region into it to work for a basically paramilitary state organization that is extracting resources such as coal and oil, and so forth. It's a related system, not completely separate and not completely the same thing either.

[Heather McPherson, NDP, Edmonton Strathcona, AB]

I have only 40 seconds. Very quickly, can you confirm, then, that obviously the mineral and resource sector wealth within that region would also be a contributing factor as to why some of these impacts are being seen?

[Dr. Elise Anderson]

Absolutely, those minerals and other resources are a contributing factor.

[Heather McPherson, NDP, Edmonton Strathcona, AB]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

That leads us into our second round of questions. There will be five minutes for each member.

We'll start with Mr. Zuberi.

[Sameer Zuberi, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

First of all, thank you, everybody, for joining us and providing your expert testimony.

I'd like to flesh this out. We spoke about supply chains. We spoke about the province, XUAR. We didn't speak about Uighur people and other minorities who are being transferred out of the province into the mainland and how those supply chains are impacted. Can you speak a bit about that?

[Amy Lehr]

I'm happy to start.

There was an important report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, or ASPI, that went into this in some detail.

I mentioned earlier these programs around pairing, the pairing program where the mainland companies are paired up with different parts of Xinjiang, and then also poverty alleviation and labour transfers.

What we've seen is that some of these minorities are being transferred, actually in quite large numbers, tens of thousands, to other parts of China to work in supplier factories. What the ASPI report indicated is that some of those factories are, in fact, in the supply chains of major global brands. Therefore, that's a new risk that needs to be better understood and that companies certainly should be able to identify and address.

[Sameer Zuberi, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

There are about 83 companies, big-name companies, brand name companies, named in that report.

While we look at what is produced within the province, in our analysis at the same time we should also be looking at what is produced outside the province that is coming from forced labour.

[Amy Lehr]

That's right.

One of the things we're trying to understand better, which I mentioned, is that with the pairing program, certain Chinese provinces that are participating, their companies have basically helped dictate the sectoral focus of that particular pairing program. Therefore, you might even be able to say that in this province the highest risk is going to be in electronics and food production, but in another province it might be apparel. If you do the research, there are some indicators of risk.

[Sameer Zuberi, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

Okay.

Can you speak about Canadian technology, or western technology in general, supporting the surveillance of the minorities we're talking about here within the province?

[Amy Lehr]

If it's okay, I'll take that on and then maybe anyone else might want to follow up.

It's a great question and one that needs, frankly, more understanding. We know that actually the surveillance in the province is primarily being conducted by Chinese companies and that really, in a way, this is like their laboratory for experimentation. They're getting lots of funding from the state, so they're getting very good at things such as facial recognition and machine learning. However, there are components they need from the west, DNA sequencers, so they're getting probably some components and parts from the west, and there have been a series of U.S. government actions to try to address that as recently as yesterday.

Also, the other thing to look at that people aren't considering very much is who is investing in some of these Chinese companies, and whether there is U.S. or Canadian venture capital that's going into the Chinese companies that are actually directly involved in the abuses.

[Sameer Zuberi, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

I don't know if anybody else has contributed to that but I just want to throw one thought out while you do contribute. Can we also tie in the Chinese papers and how new information has come out which shows there's a program going on from the top. Could you factor that into your answer please?

[Dr. Elise Anderson]

I will just jump in to address this point about technology and the high-tech tools.

I'll just say a number of these Chinese companies, as Ms. Lehr just said, are really involved in the surveillance that packages what is happening together. They have deep and close ties to universities, research centres, and other researchers around the world. We've seen cases of U.S.-based research labs that have scientists who have been collaborating and not really realizing in some cases that they are collaborating on something so sinister ultimately.

From our perspective we think it is vital at the Uyghur Human Rights Project to make sure that tech firms in China who are doing work like this and are contributing to the system cannot buy components from companies outside. That is one way to help stop this from happening.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

We will go to Mr. Genuis for five minutes.

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to the witnesses.

I'll just pick up with Ms. Lehr right where we were.

There are a number of companies, Nuctech, Dahua, Hikvision, and these are Chinese companies with close relationships with the Chinese state that we know play some role in supplying security technology. In fact, we also know there are cases where the Government of Canada has considered purchasing technology from these companies. Also with Dahua and Hikvision our pension fund is invested in these companies. I wonder if you would recommend that we take a simple step and prohibit this kind of action going forward.

[Amy Lehr]

I would assume that your pension fund has social and environmental screens that it uses when it invests, and if so it would seem to me that if they took those seriously, it would have implications for those kinds of investments and that would be an opportunity to try to act.

I also think obviously what the U.S. has been doing with export controls is worth looking at, because there's been a whole series, as you're probably aware, of different export controls from the U.S. that really focus on the sale of certain kinds of technologies to these companies based on the fact that they're involved in human rights abuses in Xinjiang as surveillance and technology companies. Those are two obvious opportunities.