Submission to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child
August 3, 2026
Forced labour plays a central, enabling role within the broader pattern of human rights violations in the Uyghur Region: the threat of arbitrary detention removes any real option to resist a labour-transfer posting; as a result, working-age adults are removed from their communities, leading to the institutionalisation of children and elderly relatives — who are in turn cut off from their culture — while the land and villages left behind by coerced workers are appropriated or demolished by the government. This submission focuses on one link in that chain: state policies that replace or displace family caregiving responsibilities in order to facilitate labour transfers.
It primarily relates to Cluster 5 (“Family Environment and Alternative Care”), while also engaging the Committee’s General Principles and relevant Special Protection Measures. In the context of a labour-transfer system implemented through quotas, household monitoring, ideological pressure and penalties for refusal, any resulting separation of children from their parents should be presumed to be involuntary.
Photo by the Committee on the Rights of the Child.