Recorded on March 24, 2021.
Asian Supply Chains & Human Rights
About the event
This panel will discuss the human rights problems created by the global supply chains that are anchored in Asia and ask why solutions are so elusive. These problems include: abuse of workers at factories under contract to multinationals; pollution and destruction of habitats by the factories, supporting infrastructure, and raw materials extraction; and in Xinjiang, forcing ethnic minorities to work in farms and factories that export their products. Since the global supply chain model emerged in the 1990s, responses have included self-regulation by factories and their multinational clients, sometimes in response to consumer boycotts in rich countries; attempted intervention using local law or laws of the investor or buyer country; “naming and shaming” by NGOs; and foreign government sanctions. Speakers will assess why these approaches have often failed, identify successes, and offer their own prescriptions.
This event is part of the Timothy A. Gelatt Dialogue on the Rule of Law in East Asia
Agenda
Introduction
Scott Nova: State Sanctions and Import Bans
Zhang Jingjing: Using Host Country Legal Processes to Address Environmental Damage from Resource Extraction
Trang (Mae) Nguyen: Voluntary Standard-Setting Agreements and Mediation
Panel Discussion, Audience Question and Answer
Course Materials for CLE Credit:
United Nations Human Rights Council, Open-ended intergovernmental working group on transnational corporations and other business enterprises with respect to human rights: second revised draft.
Aaron Halegua and Xiaohui Ban, Labour Protections for Overseas Chinese Workers
Trang Mae Nguyen, Co-Constructing Business Governance
Better Factories, Cambodia Report Compliance Review (2018)
Better Factories, Cambodia Report Transparency (2019)
U.S. State Department, U.S. Xinjiang Supply Chain Business Advisory
U.S. Congress, Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act
U.S. Customs and Border Protection, CBP Issues Region-Wide Withhold Release Order on Products Made by Slave Labor in Xinjiang
U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Withhold Release Orders and Findings
Robert V. Percival and Zhang Jingjing, Transnational Environmental Accountability
Coenen, Bager, Meyfroidt, Newig, and Challies, Environmental Governance of China’s Belt and Road Initiative
ATTORNEY AFFIRMATION FORM FOR CLE CREDIT & PANEL EVALUATION
Panelists:
Trang (Mae) Nguyen is an assistant professor of law at Temple University Beasley School of Law. Prior to joining Temple Law School, she served as the John N. Hazard Fellow at the U.S.-Asia Law Institute, New York University School of Law and a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley’s Center for the Study of Law and Society. Professor Nguyen’s research uses mixed empirical methods to study transnational business governance, global supply chains, and authoritarian legality, with a focus on Asia. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the American Journal of International Law Unbound, the Stanford Law and Policy Review, the Harvard Human Rights Journal, and the New York University Law Review, among others. Prior to entering academia, Professor Nguyen practiced corporate law in the Silicon Valley office of Davis Polk & Wardwell, LLP, and served on the policy team of the California Office of the Attorney General. Professor Nguyen earned a J.D. degree from NYU School of Law, where she was a Law and Business Scholar and an executive editor of the NYU Law Review.
Scott Nova is executive director of the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC). The WRC is an independent labor rights monitoring organization that conducts investigations of working conditions in factories around the globe. The WRC’s purpose is to combat sweatshops and protect the rights of workers who sew apparel and make other products sold in the United States and Canada—in particular, garments bearing the logos of the WRC’s affiliate universities and colleges. Prior to joining the WRC, Nova was executive director of the Citizens Trade Campaign, a national coalition of environmental, religious, human rights, labor, and other public interest groups. Citizens Trade Campaign is one of the nation’s foremost advocates of an approach to US trade policy that makes human rights, worker rights, and environmental protection central priorities. Nova has also served as director of the Preamble Center, a DC-based research and policy organization that focused on a broad range of economic issues, from Social Security to international commerce.
Zhang Jingjing is a Chinese environmental lawyer, the founder and executive director of the Center for Transnational Environmental Accountability, and a lecturer in law at the University of Maryland Carey School of Law. As the first litigation director at the Beijing-based Center for Legal Assistance to Pollution Victims between 1999 and 2008, Zhang won several milestone environmental litigation cases in Chinese courts. She later worked for the Natural Resources Defense Council China Program and was deputy China country director of PILnet, an NGO that promotes public interest lawyering. She was selected as an Open Society Fellow in 2015, Yale World Fellow in 2008, and won the SEE-TNC Eco-award and the Women of Courage Award given by the U.S. Embassy in Beijing in 2011. Since 2015, Zhang has focused on monitoring China’s global environmental footprint and trying various legal strategies to ensure Chinese overseas companies’ compliance with environmental laws and international human rights standards. Zhang holds a Master of Public Administration from Harvard University Kennedy School of Government, an LL.M from China University of Political Science and Law, and an LL.B from Wuhan University.
About the moderator:
Aaron Halegua is the founding member of Aaron Halegua, PLLC and a research fellow at both NYU Law School’s Center for Labor and Employment Law and U.S.-Asia Law Institute. His interests include labor and employment law, dispute resolution, legal aid and access to justice, labor trafficking, labor issues involving “One Belt, One Road” investments. Mr. Halegua recently assisted over 2,400 Chinese construction workers trafficked to Saipan to recover $14 million in backpay, and he is currently litigating a case in a U.S. federal court to recover compensation for trafficked workers injured on that project. Mr. Halegua has also consulted for Apple, Asia Society, International Labor Rights Forum, Ford Foundation, Service Employees International Union, International Labor Organization, and Brown University on labor issues in China, Thailand, Myanmar and Mexico. He is the author of numerous book chapters, articles, and op-eds about labor issues, including the report Who Will Represent China’s Workers: Lawyers, Legal Aid, and the Enforcement of Labor Rights (2016). Mr. Halegua has an A.B. from Brown University and J.D. from Harvard Law School. He was a Fulbright Scholar at Peking University Law School after college. He speaks, reads and writes Mandarin Chinese.