US lawmakers on Wednesday proposed a ban on most imports from China's Xinjiang region, charging that goods produced by Uighur forced laborers were making their way into the United States.
The United States already bans products made through slavery but with China holding more than one million Uighurs and other Muslims in camps in Xinjiang, lawmakers said that forced labor was interwoven into the region's economy.
"These practices in Xinjiang are one of the world's largest human tragedies. It remains unimaginable, frankly, that this is happening in 2020," Senator Marco Rubio, a Republican sponsor of the bipartisan bill, told reporters.
Representative Jim McGovern, a Democrat who leads the Congressional-Executive Committee on China, which looks at human rights, said that witnesses, surveillance photos and leaked documents all showed the existence of forced labor.
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