By Patricia Zengerle
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Senate passed legislation on Thursday to ban imports from China’s Xinjiang region over concerns about forced labor, part of Washington’s continued pushback against Beijing’s treatment of the country’s Uyghur Muslim minority.
The Senate passed the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act by unanimous consent, sending it to the White House where President Joe Biden has said he will sign it into law. The House of Representatives passed the bill by unanimous voice vote on Tuesday.
The measure rushed through Congress after lawmakers agreed on a compromise that eliminated differences between bills introduced in the House and Senate.
Republicans and Democrats in the House and Senate have been arguing over the Uyghur legislation for months. The dispute complicated passage of the annual National Defense Authorization Act and has held up the Senate’s confirmation of some of Biden’s ambassadorial nominees, including his selection of Nicholas Burns to be ambassador to China.
The compromise keeps a provision creating a “rebuttable presumption” that all goods from Xinjiang, where the Chinese government has set up a network of detention camps for Uyghurs and other Muslim groups, were made with forced labor, in order to bar such imports.
“It is a horrifying human rights situation, fully sanctioned, as we now know, by the Communist Party of China,” said Republican Senator Marco Rubio, urging senators to vote for the bill.
China denies abuses in Xinjiang, which supplies much of the world’s materials for solar panels, but the U.S. government and many rights groups say Beijing is carrying out genocide there.
Republicans had accused Biden’s Democrats of slow-walking the legislation because it would complicate the president’s renewable energy agenda. Democrats denied that.
(Reporting by Patricia Zengerle; Editing by Bernadette Baum)
