'40% of UK solar farms use panels from firms linked to Xinjiang forced labour camps'

Some 40% of solar farms in Britain, including those used in projects commissioned by government departments such as defence and coal, use panels from firms linked to forced labour camps in China's Xinjiang, a UK paper has reported.

Workers from the Uyghur minority in the region have reportedly been subjected to exploitative and abusive living and working conditions that may constitute arbitrary detention, human trafficking, forced labour and enslavement by the use of forced labour.

Findings gathered by a UN working group on Business and Human Rights had stated that "hundreds of thousands of members of the Uyghur minority have been held in 're-education' facilities" and that "many have also reportedly been forcibly transferred to work in factories in the Xinjiang Uyghur autonomous region and other Chinese provinces".

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According to a new report from The Guardian, which named Jinko Solar, JA Solar and Trina Solar as firms benefiting from forced labour in the Chinese region.Those firms are some of the biggest manufacturers of solar panels in the world, but recent research shows that they could be leveraging forced labour from the more than one million men and women from the Muslim Uyghur community that have been interned in camps in the Xinjiang region.

As per The Guardian's report, confidential industry data suggests that up to 40% of the UK’s solar farms were built using panels manufactured by China’s biggest solar panel companies, including Jinko Solar, JA Solar and Trina Solar.

These firms have been named in a recent report on the internment of more than 1 million men and women from the Muslim Uyghur community, in what UK MPs on Thursday voted to describe as genocide.

(With inputs from agencies)