Rebuttable Presumption (UFLPA)

The rebuttable presumption is the operational core of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA), signed by President Biden on 23 December 2021 and effective 21 June 2022. Under Section 3 of the Act, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) must presume that any good "mined, produced, or manufactured wholly or in part" in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), or by entities on the UFLPA Entity List maintained by the Forced Labor Enforcement Task Force (FLETF), is made with forced labor and is therefore inadmissible under 19 U.S.C. § 1307, which bars convict, forced, or indentured-labor imports.

The presumption is rebuttable: an importer may overcome it only by (1) fully complying with CBP guidance and any FLETF inquiries, (2) responding completely and substantively to all information requests, and (3) demonstrating by clear and convincing evidence that the supply chain is free of forced labor. In practice this requires granular tracing — purchase orders, transportation records, time cards, worker interviews — back to raw inputs such as cotton, polysilicon, or tomatoes, the three "high-priority sectors" named in the FLETF Strategy released June 2022.

Key features delegates should note:

• It shifts the burden of proof from the government to the importer, a significant departure from ordinary customs enforcement.
• It applies extraterritorially to inputs: a shirt sewn in Vietnam from Xinjiang cotton is still presumed tainted.
• CBP publishes aggregate enforcement statistics; by mid-2024 thousands of shipments worth several billion dollars had been detained, with electronics, apparel, and agriculture leading.
• The Entity List has expanded iteratively, adding firms tied to labor-transfer programs moving Uyghur workers out of XUAR.

China has rejected the underlying findings as interference in internal affairs, while the EU advanced its own Forced Labour Regulation (adopted 2024) that uses a different, risk-based model rather than a geographic presumption.