October 16, 2023 — A weak social auditing process, including heavy reliance on self-assessments, allowed the presence of Uyghurs in Chinese seafood processing facilities to go undetected by seafood certification nonprofits including the Marine Stewardship Council, the Aquaculture Stewardship Council, and the British Retail Consortium, according to a report from The Outlaw Ocean Project.
The independent journalism group published a report in The New Yorker on 9 October outlining its investigation into the use of state-sponsored forced labor, as defined by the U.S. Uyghur Forced Labor Protection Act of 2021, in 11 Chinese seafood processing plants, most of which carried the joint MSC/ASC chain of custody certification.