"EURO 2024 sponsors linked to forced labour and pornographic content for minors" 24 June 2024

Alipay. BYD. AliExpress. Vivo. If you’ve been following the UEFA EURO 2024, these Chinese companies are hard to miss as they dominate the stadium banners...Some of these sponsorships raise serious concerns and call UEFA's credibility and ethical standards into doubt. The sponsors are linked to a wide range of contentious issues such as allegations of mass labour abuses of Uyghurs, pornographic content for minors to illegal subsidisation, political interference, and fundamental human rights violations...

On March 27, 2024, UEFA announced AliExpress as an official partner for UEFA EURO 2024... The announcement came only two weeks after the European Commission launched a formal investigation into the platform over concerns about illegal content.  Key issues include the platform's failure to enforce its own terms of service, posing risks to consumers’ health by selling fake medicine and food as well as dietary supplements...

UEFA has also entered into partnerships with companies owned by Chinese global trading platform Alibaba...In December 2020, the US-based surveillance research firm IPVM released a report which revealed that Alibaba, the parent company of UEFA and EURO 2024 sponsors Alipay and AliExpress, offered facial recognition software to its clients which was capable of identifying ethnic minorities and was specifically set up to search for Uyghurs. Alibaba quickly responded to the allegations, stating that it ”stopped trying to identify faces by ethnicity after the company was accused this week of creating a facial recognition system meant to detect Uyghurs”...

There are also links between some EURO 2024 sponsors and the practice of forced labour in China...Vivo, a Chinese multinational technology company and EURO 2024 sponsor, is among those who reportedly benefit directly or indirectly from using Uyghur workers... BYD, a leading Chinese electric vehicle manufacturer and EURO 2024 sponsor, has also been implicated in using aluminium made by Uyghur forced labour, according to a February 2024 report by Human Rights Watch...