The House has passed legislation aimed at condemning human rights abuses in China after the White House announced it will conduct a diplomatic boycott of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics.
Ahead of Wednesday’s House votes, the United States called China’s treatment of its Uyghur Muslim minority in the country’s Xinjiang province genocide, including forced labor and sterilizations. Several allied nations, including Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom, joined the diplomatic boycott. In a diplomatic boycott, no U.S. government officials will attend the Games, but athletes will still be able to compete.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced earlier this week that the chamber would consider legislation including the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act; and resolutions expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that the International Olympic Committee “failed to adhere to its own human rights commitments,” and a resolution condemning “the ongoing genocide and crimes against humanity being committed against Uyghurs and members of other religious and ethnic minority groups by the People’s Republic of China.”
At a press conference Wednesday, Pelosi said the legislation sends “a clear message that Beijing’s crimes against the Uyghur people constitute genocide and must end now.”
“If we refuse to act upon or speak out against violations of human rights in countries because of economic reasons, then we lose all moral authority to speak out against human rights violations anywhere,” Pelosi said.
Although it is broadly supported, Congress has thus far failed to send the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act to Biden’s desk. The bill would prohibit goods produced in the Xinjiang region from being imported into the U.S. unless Customs and Border Protection officials determine they were not produced with forced labor.
Although it has been passed in both chambers — even passing the Senate unanimously — the House needed to pass it again since its original vote occurred last session. They must now reconcile the two versions of the bills in order to send a final version to President Joe Biden. Leaders seemed unable to come to an agreement on a process to pass the bill.
The Washington Post reported last week that a Biden administration official asked Senate Democrats to water down the bill by taking “a more targeted and deliberative approach to determining which goods are the products of forced labor.”
In a Wednesday statement, Sen. Marco Rubio, the co-sponsor of the Senate’s version of the bill, said, “I am glad the House is finally taking action to crack down on slave labor in China.”
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“However, the Biden administration and some big corporations are still working to make sure this bill never becomes law,” the Florida Republican said. “And they are already working to complicate things here in the Senate. Anyone who helps them stop our efforts while hiding behind procedures and technicalities should be called out for that.”
