[Full response attached]

...Have you been able to conduct audits/certifications/impact assessments in Xinjiang in recent years?

TCO Certified is a sustainability certification for IT products. The criteria in the certification cover both social and environmental sustainability during the product’s full life cycle and go beyond industry standards and legislation. Criteria in TCO Certified create a framework that the IT brands can use to continuously and systematically improve environmental and working conditions in their supply chains.

TCO Certified also includes a comprehensive system of independent verification in accordance with ISO standards, both pre and post-certification. Accredited verification organizations carry out product testing, perform factory audits and verify corrective actions as well as assess environmental compliance. The brand owner is accountable for ensuring that certified products, and the factories where they are made, comply with the criteria in TCO Certified during the certificate’s full validity period.

The criteria for socially responsible manufacturing in TCO Certified are built on specific factory audits in three different auditing systems, SA8000, RBA, and BSCI. These audit types set a minimum quality standard on how auditors must work to gather information at the factories...

...TCO Certified requires that every final assembly factory must undergo an independent audit according to one of the approved audit types. The final assembly factory will be registered in the TCO Certified Accepted Factory List based on the audit report. To drive improvement where it is needed, factories are categorized depending on high or low-risk. High-risk factories on the TCO Certified Accepted Factory List require audits more often than low-risk factories. The TCO Certified Accepted Factory list is available to all brand owners using TCO Certified to give them the opportunity to choose factories that work proactively with solving sustainability issues.

There are no final assembly factories situated in the Xinjiang province on the TCO Certified Accepted Factory List, meaning that no certified products are manufactured there.

After the problems in the Xinjiang province were reported we have made further investigations in the supply chains of certified products, and we did not detect any sub-suppliers for certified products in the Xinjiang province...