Daily Brief Audio Series
Today we’ve got good news, bad news, and some hope for progress – and it’s all about aluminum.
Regular readers may recall our story from earlier this year, when we looked at the connection between aluminum in cars and forced labor in China’s northwestern region of Xinjiang.
Aluminum is a key element in the manufacture of cars. The metal and its alloys are used in dozens of automotive parts, from engine blocks and vehicle frames to wheels and components of electric batteries. These parts are found in cars made in China, and they’re also exported to carmakers globally.
One key source of this aluminum in China is Xinjiang, where its production has grown massively in recent years.
Aluminum producers in Xinjiang, like many industries in the region, participate in Chinese government-backed forced labor programs. That’s the system of forced labor that coerces Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims into jobs. It’s just one disturbing part of the Chinese government’s extensive repression in Xinjiang, which includes crimes against humanity.
But it is a part of the abuses in Xinjiang that other countries can surely do something about. Governments overseeing large car markets around the world have leverage here.
The good news is, this week, the United States government took a welcome step in this direction. The US has added aluminum to its list of priority sectors for the enforcement of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. The law aims to block items made in Xinjiang with state-imposed forced labor from entering the US market.
The decision will likely have a significant impact on how car companies source their parts for cars they sell in the massive US market. Because they need to assume anything aluminum coming from Xinjiang could be tainted by forced labor, they’re going to have to rethink where they get their parts from.
The bad news is, the other major consumer market in the world – the European Union – has been slower to address forced labor in Xinjiang. The EU has put tariffs on electric cars, but that has nothing to do with human rights; it’s an economic security measure.
However, we could see change for the better soon. The EU is one step away from adopting the Forced Labor Regulation (FLR), a law that aims to prevent EU consumers from buying goods produced with forced labor anywhere in the world.
Before it’s implemented, the European Commission will publish an online database on specific geographic areas and sectors where forced labor is a risk, including regions where state authorities impose forced labor. It’s essential they put Xinjiang and the aluminum sector on that list, along with more than 17 industries associated with state-imposed forced labor there.
Hopefully, with so much pressure from major consumer markets around the world and automakers required to source their products more responsibly, the Chinese government will feel the pinch and roll back its forced labor program in Xinjiang. That’s the goal.
Since the beginning of Sudan’s conflict in April last year, we’ve been ringing alarm bells about the crisis, again and again, and highlighting the international community’s failure to address it. We’ve focused a lot on Darfur, in the west of the country, where wide-scale atrocities have forced more than half a million people to flee their homes, many across the western border to Chad.
Today, we’re going to look at the conflict on the opposite side of Sudan, in the east, in areas that border Eritrea and Ethiopia.
The fighting in Sudan between the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) is causing intense civilian suffering for Sudanese citizens in many parts of the country. And they’re not the only ones.
Often overlooked is that more than one million refugees were living in Sudan when the conflict started, many of them in the east.
These are people who fled severe repression in Eritrea or the atrocity-filled conflict in Ethiopia’s Tigray region, hoping to find safety in Sudan. Now, their lives could be in danger again.
Recent weeks have seen RSF attacks on towns in the area. If this spreads to other parts of the eastern border region, the fate of tens of thousands of refugees will be very much at risk.
Refugees from Ethiopia in particular have been trying to draw attention to their precarious situation since the Sudanese conflict began. Some fear they will be targeted by the warring parties after being accused of assisting enemies. There are already reports some have been arrested or detained.
There’s no clear protection or evacuation strategy for any of these refugees.
Eritreans can’t return home due to ongoing repression – they would likely be punished severely if they ever stepped foot back in Eritrea.
Some refugees from Ethiopia would also face violence or persecution if they returned. Many are ethnic Tigrayans from western Tigray who fled a brutal ethnic cleansing campaign, and those responsible for it still control the area.
Some Ethiopian refugees may be able to return, but they would need cooperation from Sudanese authorities, Ethiopian authorities, and UN agencies to make it happen. The emphasis would have to be on voluntary returns – assisting refugees and providing safe, organized pathways back. No one should be coerced or forced to return to any place where they’d face serious risks.
The international community really needs to step up here and consider all possible means of support, including cash and transport, to ensure that refugees are moved out of harm’s way.
In the whirlwind of extreme violence that’s engulfed Sudan and put so many Sudanese in danger, refugees in Sudan from Ethiopia and Eritrea deserve support, too.
Let’s start with the basics: everyone has the right to seek asylum in another country.
This does not mean that anyone can just live wherever they want. No. It means you have the right to ask for asylum, and the authorities have to consider your individual case and treat you humanely in the meantime. This is grounded in international human rights and refugee law, and, in the European Union, in the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights.
In recent years, it seems many politicians in the European Union have forgotten this fundamental point and the authorities’ obligation to uphold these rights. However, with a new EU leadership coming onboard soon, there’s an opportunity for a rethink – a chance to get back to basics.
European leaders have brought about some truly terrible policies in recent years. Regular readers will recall what amounts to a “let them die” approach toward refugee boats in the Mediterranean Sea. Authorities in EU countries such as Greece and Poland have treated humanitarian aid workers as criminals when they’ve sought to help desperate asylum seekers.
In EU member Croatia, authorities have physically brutalized asylum seekers on the border with methods so awful, they violate international prohibitions on torture – while the EU simply turned away.
Another abusive approach EU governments are increasingly turning to is what’s called “externalization,” “outsourcing,” or “offshoring” to third countries – that is sending asylum seekers for processing to countries outside the EU. Authorities are ignoring their legal obligations and paying other countries to do their job for them.
EU member states are not alone in this, of course. Recall Australia’s abusive and expensive failures with “offshoring” and the UK’s cruel and costly attempts to send asylum seekers to Rwanda.
In the EU, at least 15 member states have endorsed such measures to shift asylum processing outside EU territory. A prominent example is Italy’s dodgy deal with Albania. The 700-million-euro scheme steamrollers over the rights of asylum seekers, who could find themselves in prolonged detention and legal limbo.
However, we are now – hopefully – at a moment of possible change for the EU. With recent European elections and a new European Commission forming (even if it will include some old faces), there’s a fresh opportunity to rethink all these policies and get the EU and its member countries to work within legal and moral boundaries.
A new statement by 95 human rights and humanitarian groups is drawing attention to “externalization” in particular. It reminds EU leaders that transfering asylum seekers for processing to countries outside of the EU is incompatible with their international and European legal obligations.
Let’s hope EU leaders use this moment to get back to basics on asylum and commit themselves to respecting fundamental rights.
Imagine you’re the leader of your country… Would you meet with a leader from another country responsible for atrocities and wanted for war crimes?
This question has emerged twice in recent days, in separate top-level meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin. He has key responsibility for ongoing Russian atrocities in Ukraine and is personally wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for war crimes.
Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán met with Putin last week. India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi is meeting Putin today and tomorrow.
Orbán’s face-to-face with the Russian president in Moscow on Friday brought a wave of condemnation from Hungary’s EU partners and fellow members of the ICC. This included a highly unusual statement from the head of EU foreign affairs, emphasizing it was purely a bilateral meeting between Hungary and Russia, not related to Hungary currently holding the EU’s rotating presidency.
Still, as my colleague, Iskra Kirova, noted, the meeting risked “being an affront to victims of grave abuses in Ukraine.”
Putin’s meeting with India’s Modi now brings up the same concern, with an additional angle for everyone in India with a sense of history. Writing for the Indian news outlet Scroll, HRW’s Meenakshi Ganguly and Rachel Denber reminded Modi:
“Russia’s tactics mirror those of colonial armies, something that the prime minister of a country that bore the brunt of colonialism should speak up against.”
Leaders have various strategies to try to confront the bad optics of meeting with people linked to atrocities. Both Orbán and Modi have already met with Putin since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, usually couching it in terms of peace efforts or claims they are mentioning Russia’s abuses privately.
Victims of Russian atrocities in Ukraine will hardly find such “silent diplomacy” encouraging, given its lack of results on the ground, where atrocities continue.
This brings us back to the general question – should you meet with such abusive leaders? – and perhaps also to a general answer.
What these meetings achieve for the abusive dictators is obvious: a photo op that helps them claim everything is normal, that they are not a pariah and fugitive from justice. Look, if these people are meeting with me, I can’t be as terrible as my enemies claim, right?
But what do such meetings achieve for the people getting slaughtered and tortured? The question, then, is not really whether to have a meeting or not, but what your aim in having the meeting is and what issues you will raise.
If a meeting with an abusive leader can be used to draw attention to victims’ suffering and call for atrocities to end – publicly, not ignorably privately – that might be worth having a meeting for.
Orbán failed that test last week. Let’s see how Modi does today and tomorrow.
Officials from the Czech Republic are reportedly preparing a fact-finding mission to Syria. Their aim is to create a “safe zone” in Syria, so countries in the European Union can deport Syrian refugees there.
Let me save them the cost of their flights and the impact of their carbon footprint by giving them the facts Human Rights Watch and every other serious human rights group have already found: there is no safe area in Syria for refugees to return to.
The effort to imagine or establish such “safe zones” in Syria has a long history. It’s the politics of “let’s pretend,” dreamed up again and again, right from the earliest years of Syria’s civil war.
Countries faced with the prospect of hosting Syrian refugees wanted to believe there are parts of Syria they could send refugees back to, even when it’s clearly untrue. Turkey has tried to create a “safe zone” in Syria. It’s been one of the most dangerous places in Syria.
Governments are also ignoring the history of “safe zones” in conflicts generally. It shows a disastrously poor record in protecting civilians. Srebrenica in Bosnia-Herzegovina is only one horrific example.
Still, governments keep chasing the idea. The Czechs’ reported fact-finding mission may also involve Cyprus, another European Union member state keen on the notion of a “safe zone” in Syria.
Not that the government of Cyprus cares much about Syrian refugees being safe, of course. They’re already pushing back refugee boats to Lebanon, where security forces have a grim record of deporting Syrians over the border to Syria.
The fact-finding mission is looking at two areas – Damascus and Tartous – both under Syrian-government control.
Those who don’t need a fact-finding mission will recall this is the same Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad that caused more than half a million deaths and forcibly displaced 12 million people since the war started in 2011. It’s the same government that continues to be responsible for ongoing widespread and systematic torture.
Are EU governments backing the tried-and-failed idea of “safe zones” in Syria because they’re delusional, willfully ignorant, or arrogant? Some combination of these? Or do officials feel under pressure from those xenophobic politicians who’ve promised the public that punishing refugees will somehow make their lives better and now have to deliver some sort of punishment?
In any case, they’re living in an alternate universe.
I know facts can be deeply unpopular in some segments of European politics these days, but I’m going to tell you the facts anyway: there is no place in Syria that’s safe for refugee returns.