Human rights campaign in Wolfsburg

The Wolfsburg-based automotive group Volkswagen should withdraw from the western Chinese province of Xinjiang / East Turkestan – as demanded by the Society for Threatened Peoples (STP), the East Turkistan Union in Europe, the Jewish Students Union Germany (JSUD), and the Ilham Tohti Initiative. On Tuesday, these human rights organizations protested at Wolfsburg's main train station to draw attention to the ongoing crimes in the region.

"The Volkswagen AG makes itself complicit in the crimes by remaining silent regarding the human rights violations in the immediate vicinity of its plant in Urumqi," stated Hanno Schedler, STP expert on genocide prevention and the Responsibility to Protect, at the event. "The Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and Kyrgyz Muslims in Xinjiang are no less oppressed than the people of Brazil were during the military dictatorship. Recently, the company had to pay compensation in the millions because of its collaboration with the regime back then. The company's management must remember its own code of conduct and stop this immediately, instead of repeating the mistakes of the past. Other international companies such as H&M and Adidas have already declared that they will keep the Xinjiang region out of their supply chains.

"Volkswagen is dependent on the Chinese market, so the company submits to the Chinese Communist Party," Schedler said. "But a global company cannot afford such a lack of morale. VW must grant UN experts access to the plant in Urumqi and make sure to remove forced labor from the local supply chains. The state of Lower Saxony, as an important shareholder, must help to bring light to the situation." Further, the organization called for a supply chain law at the federal level, to ensure that corporations can be held accountable if they profit from human rights violations in their supply chain. So far, business and politics have been blaming each other, with the result that the situation is not improving.

Over the last few years, there have been ever new shocking reports on the devastating human rights situation in China. New internment camps are being built in Xinjiang province, increasingly near industrial parks. According to reports, prisoners are forced to work without pay – and it recently became known that this system of internment and forced labor is increasingly being established in Tibet as well.