Today: Join WRC to Discuss Our Guidance to Licensees on Uyghur Forced Labor
Uyghur Forced Labor and University Logo Apparel
Today
2:30 p.m. – 3:30 p.m. ET
Dear colleagues,
As a reminder, the WRC invites you to join us today for our webinar on Uyghur Forced Labor and the WRC’s new guidance to licensees. Two guest speakers, Nury Turkel and Amy Lehr, will be joining our staff on the webinar to provide context on the connection between the collegiate apparel industry and the human rights crisis in the Xinjiang region.
Nury Turkel is a lawyer and Uyghur human rights advocate. He was appointed to the US Commission on International Religious Freedom in May 2020. He also serves as Chair of the Board for the Uyghur Human Rights Project, which he co-founded in 2003. He is the first US-educated Uyghur lawyer.
Amy Lehr is Director of the Human Rights Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. She served as legal advisor to the UN Special Representative on business and human rights and helped develop the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.
The event is free for WRC affiliates but requires registration; please register to receive the Zoom link. If you have already registered, Zoom will send an email reminder with the link to join 1 hour before the meeting.
The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) is the locus of a human rights catastrophe. The Chinese government is subjecting Uyghurs and other Turkic and Muslim peoples to arbitrary mass detention, forced sterilization, and systematic forced labor.
The XUAR is the source of 20% of the world’s cotton. This means 1 in 5 garments entering the US, including university apparel, may be tainted by forced labor.
The WRC has just issued guidance to licensees on the steps they must take to comply with university codes of conduct and ensure they are not putting university logos on garments made with forced labor.
During this webinar, the WRC will review the licensee guidance in detail, discuss the implementation process for licensees, outline the means we will use to verify compliance, and answer questions universities have about these topics. We will also share broader information about cotton supply chains and the apparel industry’s response to the Uyghur human rights crisis.
Join us to hear from WRC staff, an expert on cotton supply chains, and a Uyghur human rights advocate about the challenges that the XUAR human rights crisis poses for the collegiate supply chain and the steps we have asked licensees to take.