A copy of the document (which was never officially released in full) was sent to an NGO and confirms the unreliability of the audit that last December should have absolved Volkswagen of accusations of exploitation of the Uyghurs. Chinese Brief accuses: “They used an inexperienced law firm and methodologies that could not verify the real conditions.”
Milan (/Agencies) – Volkswagen would have turned to a Chinese legal consulting company faithful to the patriotic propaganda of the Party to prepare the controversial audit that last December should have freed the controversial Urumqi automobile plant from the accusation of using labor forced labor of Uyghurs, the Muslim minority at the center of accusations of human rights violations by Beijing in Xinjiang. Even in the execution methods, the investigation would suffer from substantial flaws, such as the use of video-recorded interviews that can be controlled by remote streaming, systems that in a context such as that of the People’s Republic of China do not protect confidentiality and therefore the possibility of expressing oneself freely.
The complaint was launched by the analysis carried out by Adrian Zenz, director of China Studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in Washington and published by China Brief, the Jamestown Foundation’s China newsletter. The study is based on a report from last December that Volkswagen never published, limiting itself to disseminating the conclusions, according to which the investigation verified the application of the SA8000 social responsibility standards and those of the International Labor Organization, and would have been carried out by a company with experience in carrying out social audits. A copy of the original text, which appears to have been materially produced by Liangma Law, a Shenzhen consulting firm, was delivered anonymously to the Washington headquarters of the NGO Campaign for Uyghurs. Zenz’s analysis of this text confirms serious doubts about the reliability of these statements.
Volkswagen’s plant in Xinjiang was founded in 2013, and as of the end of 2023 it employed 197 people, 47 of whom were from “ethnic minorities.” In the past there have also been specific allegations that China Railway Engineering Corporation employed “teams of Uyghur workers” for the construction of an automobile test track in the Turpan area. That is why the issue of control of supply chains is also so important in light of the regulation approved by the European Parliament last April that prohibits the sale in the European Union of products resulting from forced labor.
As published Chinese Briefthe audit did not meet the SA8000 certification criteria at all. The Liangma company team is made up of people with no experience in this area: two of their Chinese lawyers and a British army veteran who includes running a pub in Suzhou on his resume, but very little on the subject of liability. social of companies. Furthermore, the report would completely lack answers to questions that are considered essential, such as: do workers have the possibility of freely interrupting the employment relationship? Are their identity documents retained? Are workers required to pay labor costs or expenses? Does the workplace or entities that supply labor participate in or support human trafficking?
“Volkswagen – says the document with the conclusions of Chinese Brief – turned to an inexperienced and little-known law firm in the People’s Republic of China and a Western collaborator who, in any case, was not an expert in social audits or SA8000, to produce a high-stakes report on its much-criticized factory in Urumqi. Volkswagen then proceeded to hide their identities and instead foreground Löning, a German entity, probably to make it more presentable to the German public. Liangma’s audit – Zenz continues – did not comply with the standards it claimed to evaluate. Weaknesses in method and implementation meant it was not in a position to adequately assess the risks of forced labour. “Therefore, several statements that have been made regarding this audit are misleading or false.”
Photo: Wikimedia / N509FZ
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