U.S. to Restrict Trade with Nine Chinese Entities Related to Human Rights Abuses of Muslim Uighurs

Published by Matt Fishman on

The United States Department of Commerce has announced the “addition of the People’s Republic of China’s Ministry of Public Security’s Institute of Forensic Science and eight Chinese companies to the Entity List”.

Addition to the “Entity List” will result in these parties facing new restrictions including on exports and access to U.S. technology.

The nine Chinese entities will be added to this list as they are allegedly “complicit in human rights violations and abuses committed in China’s campaign of repression, mass arbitrary detention, forced labor and high-technology surveillance against Uighurs” in the Xinjiang region of China.

This designation by the U.S. comes about a week after the United States Senate passed the “Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act of 2020” which implored the Secretary of State to “consider strategically employing sanctions” against China, in response to their alleged “systematic detention of Muslim Uighurs”.

In the first action of this kind, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection announced earlier this month, it would detain the imported merchandise of a hair products company, who operates in the Xinjiang region of China, “based on information that reasonably indicates the use of forced labor”.