Asian Supply Chains & Human Rights
Asian Supply Chains & Human Rights
Wednesday, March 24, 2021
9:00 - 11:00 AM U.S. Eastern Time
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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
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. PProfessor 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. 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. 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. He was a Fulbright Scholar at Peking University Law School after college. He speaks, reads and writes Mandarin Chinese.