By The SATimes News Service
Beijing: The US will block some exports from China’s Xinjiang region, over alleged human rights abuses against the Muslim Uighur minority, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has announced.
The orders said that “forced labor” was used to make the products, including at a “vocational” center it called a “concentration camp”, reports the BBC.
The export ban includes garments, cotton, computer parts and hair products from five entities in Xinjiang as well as Anhui province.
The orders target four companies and one manufacturing site and fall short of the region-wide ban the Department had considered.
“These extraordinary human rights violations demand an extraordinary response… This is modern-day slavery,” the BBC quoted Kenneth Cuccinelli, the DHS’s Acting Secretary, as saying to the media on Monday.
“Because of its unique nature, being, applying to a region as opposed to a company or a facility, we are giving that more legal analysis.
“We want to make sure that once we proceed that it will stick, so to speak,” he added.
The move is the latest by President Donald Trump’s administration to put pressure on China over the situation in Xinjiang, the BBC reported.
