August 11, 2021

REJOINDER TO CORPORATE RESPONSES 

re: Business and Human Rights Resource Centre reporting on 

"In Broad Daylight: Uyghur Forced Labor in the Solar Supply Chain"

We write to express our gratitude to the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre for their effort to engage solar companies in a response to our report, "In Broad Daylight: Uyghur Forced Labor in Solar Supply Chains." The responses you received help us to better understand how solar energy companies are responding to the extraordinary system of mass internment and forced labor in the Uyghur Region that we described in our report. The panels those companies buy and install are very likely manufactured using raw materials mined and manufactured by companies that not only benefit but participate in the repression of minoritized citizens in the Uyghur Region.

We have been heartened to hear how seriously the solar industry has taken this unprecedented human rights crisis, and we have been following with great interest the mechanisms that companies, industry associations, and auditors are developing to extract themselves from complicity in these abuses.

The responses BHRRC received (and those we have heard from our own interactions) point to two primary strategies companies have taken since news emerged of the abuses in the Uyghur Region. First, international solar energy companies are requesting information from their first-tier suppliers about their policies regarding forced labor or sending directives to those suppliers regarding desired or required policies and traceability. Second, companies have hired third-party auditors to conduct more thorough tracing of their supply chains...