MEPs urged to ban goods made in Chinese slave labour camps

A CAMPAIGN to ban products produced in Chinese forced labour camps has been launched in the European Parliament.

Irish MEP Simon Coveney, the human rights spokesperson for the Parliament’s largest group, the EPP, said the existence of the camps, known as Laogai, is not well known.

But up to five million people are confined in them working as slave labour producing everything from artificial flowers and rubber boots to machine parts and food.

Harry Wu, who spent 19 years in one of the camps, spoke at a meeting to launch the campaign in Brussels. Now living in the US, he said the Communist regime uses the camps to maintain their dictatorship.

“It’s a well known and major suppression mechanism. The Nazi’s had their concentration camps, the Soviet Union its gulags and China has the Laogai”, he said.

Those sent to the camps for so called re-education include petty thieves, rapists, people with unapproved religious beliefs and those who speak against the regime like Mr Wu did in 1979 when he was a 19-year-old engineering student. An estimated 50 million people have been sent to them since 1949.

“You cannot say you are innocent or that you are not guilty. You must submit your written testimony and submit for reform.

“You have to give up your beliefs”, he said.

Each of the estimated camps has two names — one that identifies them as prisons and the second that identifies them as an enterprise where their inmates make goods working without pay for 16 hours a day, seven days a week.

Mr Wu admitted that it is very difficult to identify the products made in the camps. Since the US has taken action and seized some products suspected to have been made by this slave labour, the Chinese are hiding the origins of the goods.

Mr Coveney said he hopes to raise awareness of the issue and have Europe make a stand against the importation of these goods. He added that now was a good time with the renegotiation of trade agreements between the EU and China.