FILE PHOTO: People take part in a rally to encourage Canada and other countries as they consider labeling China’s treatment of its Uighur population and Muslim minorities as genocide, outside the Canadian Embassy in Washington, D.C., U.S. February 19, 2021. REUTERS/Leah Millis/File Photo
December 14, 2021
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. House of Representatives will vote on Tuesday on legislation addressing China’s treatment of its Uyghur Muslim minority, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced, after lawmakers reached a compromise agreement.
“The House will pass this legislation today and send it to the Senate for swift action and then to the President’s desk for his signature,” Pelosi said in a statement.
The House last week passed a version of the bill to ban imports from China’s Xinjiang region produced with forced labor, but that measure failed to advance to the Senate.
Republicans and Democrats in the House and Senate have been arguing over the Uyghur legislation for months.
The compromise keeps a provision creating a “rebuttable presumption” that all goods from Xinjiang, where the Chinese government has set up a network of detention camps for Uyghurs and other Muslim groups, were made with forced labor, in order to bar such imports.
China denies abuses in Xinjiang, which supplies much of the world’s materials for solar panels, but the U.S. government and many rights groups say Beijing is carrying out genocide there.
Republicans had accused Biden’s Democrats of slow-walking the legislation because it would complicate the president’s renewable energy agenda. Democrats denied that.
(Reporting by Patricia Zengerle and Michael Martina; Editing by Sonya Hepinstall and Grant McCool)
Source: One America News Network
