Green tech aids Chinese slavery: report

‘Uyghurs are being used as a source of slave labour in the mining and production of lithium, cobalt, coal and other materials crucial for these batteries,’ testified Mehliya Cetinkaya, program manager with the Alberta Uyghur Association.

Green tech aids Chinese slavery: report
AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein, File
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Green technology supply chains are tainted by slave labour, the Commons trade committee learned Wednesday. China mines lithium and manufactures solar panels using inmate labour, testified one witness.

“The turn to green energy to lower pollution and costs is good in theory,” testified Mehliya Cetinkaya, program manager with the Alberta Uyghur Association. “However, it is clear this initiative if sourced from China cannot and will not be green.”

“Uyghurs are being used as a source of slave labour in the mining and production of lithium, cobalt, coal and other materials crucial for these batteries,” said Cetinkaya. Trading with China on renewable energy technologies is directly upholding forced labour systems, reported Blacklock’s Reporter.

“They are forced by the Chinese Communist Party in fear that if they refuse, they and their entire families will be punished or worse, sent to concentration camps,” continued Cetinkaya.

The Commons in 2021 by a unanimous 266-0 vote censured China for ongoing crimes against humanity under the United Nations Convention On The Prevention And Punishment Of The Crime Of Genocide. 

The motion followed a 2020 report of a Commons subcommittee on foreign affairs that found Muslim Uyghurs were subjected to forced labour, organ harvesting, forced abortions and “the largest mass detention of a minority community since the Holocaust,” wrote MPs.

“Canada’s trade with China can be and is complicit in the Uyghur genocide,” said the Uyghur Association’s Cetinkaya. “The human rights crisis is creeping its way into our Canadian borders.”

“Canada can no longer do business as usual with China,” Cetinkaya continued. She noted other leading Chinese exports produced by slave labour include apparel, textiles and tomato paste.

On August 31, 2023, Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault left the annual conference of the China Council for International Cooperation for Environment and Development (CCICED), concluding the first meetings attended by Canada since Parliament passed the 2021 motion.

“For more than 30 years, the Council has served as a vehicle to advance policies and practices that prevent pollution, protect biodiversity and combat climate change,” said Environment Canada in a statement, marking the end of the 2023 meetings.

“The Government of Canada will challenge China when it ought to and will cooperate with China when it must,” the department said. “One of the key objectives of our strategy is to ensure a sustainable and green future for Canadians.”

Guilbeault was notably silent on China's use of slave labour to make solar panels, reported Blacklock's Reporter.

"We know that 41.7% of polysilicon used to produce solar panels, for all the environmentalists in the House, comes from Xinjiang," Liberal MP Sameer Zuberi told the Commons in 2021.

A 2021 research paper on slave labour revealed Longi Green Energy Technology Company Limited, a global leader in solar module manufacturing, is a purveyor of slave-made goods.

"Longi is a customer of many of the polysilicon companies engaged in labour transfers in the Uyghur region," said the Sheffield report In Broad Daylight: Uyghur Forced Labour And Global Solar Supply Chains. 

Reuters reported that U.S. Customs intercepted solar panel shipments from Longi, whose contractors have since been implicated in wrongdoing.

As recently as 2022, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board held $4 million in Longi shares. 

The Senate human rights committee then learned that green technology imported slave-made goods.

“Look at issues like modern slavery and the environment […] from an international standpoint,” testified Chris Crewther, head of the U.S.-based Global Fund to End Modern Slavery.

“If you look at the renewable or clean energy supply chain issues, you have situations such as in the Democratic Republic of Congo where over 35,000 children are in child labour mining cobalt, which is used in lithium-ion batteries in electric cars,” said Crewther.

“Another example on the environmental topic is the balsa wood in Ecuador, which is being illegally logged and is impacting Indigenous populations. That balsa wood is being used for wind turbines.”

“You are helping one country in terms of producing renewable energy while deforesting another nation and impacting Indigenous populations linked with forced labour,” he added. “We need to look at those issues on a holistic global basis.”

Canada news China Environment Steven Guilbeault Expose The Reset
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