The Financing & Genocide: Development Finance and the Crisis in the Uyghur Region report, published by American think tank Atlantic Council, found that the International Finance Corporation (IFC) has $486m invested in four companies operating in the Uyghur Region.
Evidence drawn from corporate disclosures and other publicly available information suggests that the four companies have directly benefited from and participated in state sponsored forced labour programmes.
The report says that the IFC’s failure to adequately safeguard communities and the environment affected by its financing in the Uyghur Region makes the institution ‘complicit in the repression of Uyghur, Kazakh and other minoritised citizens’.
The research was led by Laura T. Murphy, Professor of Human Rights at Sheffield Hallam University’s Helena Kennedy Centre for International Justice.
Professor Murphy said: "Our report clearly shows that IFC-invested companies in the Uyghur Region of China are intimately involved in coercive state-sponsored labour programs and forcible land transfers that are part of the larger genocide happening in the region. This should concern us all because the IFC is funded by our taxes."
The report recommends that the IFC and other Development Finance Institutions should divest from all corporate investments in the region.
Other recommendations include a full review of portfolios including financial intermediary investments and the creation of protocols for responsible exit from fragile and conflict-affected regions.
Allison Gill, Forced Labor Program Director at Global Labor Justice-International Labor Rights Forum, and a member of the Steering Committee of the Coalition to End Uyghur Forced Labour, said: “The IFC must implement its own standards and urgently divest from companies using and profiting from Uyghur forced labor. These investments show that the IFC is not only failing in its mandate to ‘improve lives’ but also undermining the work of governments and companies taking steps to cut ties with forced labor and promote accountability for abuses against Uyghurs.”
