Chinese cotton sold in UK could be from persecuted Uyghurs, court hears

Around 20% of the world’s cotton is made in China, and Xinjiang cotton accounts for 85% of all Chinese cotton.

In the first of two days of hearings at the High Court in London, Mr Tom Forster KC, for the World Uyghur Congress and the Global Legal Action Network, said the case was “not remotely hypothetical” but concerned the UK government’s duty to investigate whether “dirty property” was entering the country from Xinjiang.

Sir James Eadie KC, representing the home secretary, HMRC and the National Crime Agency, said the government considered China’s effort “to silence and repress Uyghurs and other minorities in Xinjiang [to be] appalling”.

However, he said there needed to be a clear link between “the alleged criminality and its specific product” to investigate whether goods were made in a foreign prison.

“At best, the claimant’s case is that there is a compelling inference of a chance that a crime has been committed but it is unable to identify how, by whom, when, or where such an offence took place,” the government’s lawyers argued.

“The existence of a general statistical likelihood is not (nor has it ever been) a basis for any criminal investigation or the exercise of any coercive power.”

They said government agencies needed the discretion to decide whether an investigation was likely to succeed before allocating resources.

“In the present context of an investigation in which the Chinese government would be implicated, there is no realistic prospect of police-to-police (or agency-to-agency) co-operation or of evidence being obtained by way of mutual legal assistance from the Chinese authorities, for example.”