UFLPA Has Achieved a Lot in a Short Period of Time, Kharon Official Says

The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act is one of the most powerful laws, "in what it's been able to achieve in such a short time," said Howard Mendelsohn, chief client officer for Kharon, a risk intelligence service provider. It was implemented so quickly that almost $2 billion worth of imports has been detained, at least temporarily.

"The law itself really turns our traditional notions of due process upside down," he said, with CBP officials telling importers they believe a product is tainted, and "you guys come in here and prove to us it’s not tainted."

Mendelsohn said Uyghur forced labor enforcement focus began with apparel, but now is transitioning to automotive and aerospace industries. "There’s a lot of will and intent to have results here," he said during an Oct. 17 panel at the OCR global conference on trade compliance in Bethesda, Maryland, outside Washington, D.C.

"For those who have been impacted it’s all-consuming," he said.

Forced labor has been the second most common reason that companies are considering hiring Kharon, he said.

Josh Frazer, director of trade compliance at DigiKey, said some of his company's solar panel imports were held up under UFLPA.

"We determined that they weren’t subject to it," he said, because there was no Xinjiang content in the panels' supply chain. But the release of the panels took awhile, because "this was towards the beginning, when this was implemented," he said. "We’re a distributor not a manufacturer. So we’ve had to get smart on that kind of stuff very quickly."

Frazer said that its clients, who once did all of their manufacturing in China because of the cost and convenience advantages it had, started moving away after the Section 301 tariffs, shifting to Malaysia, Singapore and India.

Mendelsohn noted that the majority of shipments that have been detained were not sent from China, which shows buyers need to know about tiers of suppliers that are "not in your immediate line of sight."