Uyghur report warns forced-labor risk is shifting to Australia, Japan

Australia and Japan have become the places where Uyghur forced-labor risk is most likely to hide in plain sight, the Uyghur Human Rights Project warned in a new June report. The group says that as the United States and European Union tighten border restrictions, the risk is being “redistributed, not eliminated,” and the soft spot is now in markets that rely more on disclosure than hard import bans.

The numbers are blunt. The report estimates Australia imported about $4.82 billion in high-risk goods from China in 2024, equal to 6.36 percent of its imports from China, while Japan imported about $6.71 billion, or 4.01 percent. Cotton textiles and apparel sit near the center of that exposure, alongside solar inputs, aluminum and chemical products. The report is careful on one point: those figures show exposure to sectors where forced-labor risk is well documented, not proof that every shipment was made with forced labor.

For fashion brands, that distinction matters less on paper than it does in the warehouse. If cotton cloth, trims or finished garments are moving through supply chains tied to China without the kind of border enforcement now in place in the U.S. and the E.U., then vendor audits alone are not enough. Traceability claims need to stand up at the shipment level, not just in a sustainability deck, or a phrase like “responsibly sourced” starts to look more like marketing polish than sourcing fact.

The policy split is what gives the report its sting. The U.S. Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, signed in December 2021, creates a rebuttable presumption that goods made wholly or in part in Xinjiang are barred from importation. The European Union went further in November 2024 with Regulation (EU) 2024/3015, which bans products made with forced labor on the Union market. Australia’s Modern Slavery Act and Japan’s human-rights supply-chain guidelines, by contrast, still lean on disclosure and due diligence rather than a forced-labor import prohibition that can stop suspect goods at the border.

That gap is why the report pushes both countries toward tougher tools: import prohibitions, customs enforcement authority, mandatory human-rights due diligence and stronger importer traceability requirements. Australia is already in a federal reform process, with its Anti-Slavery Commissioner urging mandatory due diligence and a mechanism to declare high-risk matters. Japan issued its non-binding human-rights supply-chain guidelines in September 2022, and Human Rights Watch has called for a rule that would make importers prove at-risk goods were not made with forced labor. For brands buying cotton outside the United States, the message is simple: the weakest border is now part of the sourcing story.