A British university complied with a demand from Beijing to halt research about human rights abuses in China, leading to a major project being dropped, the Guardian can reveal.
In February, Sheffield Hallam University, home to the Helena Kennedy Centre for International Justice (HKC), a leading research institution focused on human rights, ordered one of its best-known professors, Laura Murphy, to cease research on supply chains and forced labour in China.
Murphy’s work focuses on Uyghurs, a persecuted Muslim minority in China, being co-opted into forced labour programmes. Her research, and that of colleagues at the HKC, has been cited widely by western governments and the UN, and has helped to shape policies designed to root out goods made by forced labour from international supply chains. The Chinese government rejects accusations of forced labour, and says that Uyghur work programmes are for poverty alleviation.
In February, Murphy was told that her work on China, described previously by the university as “groundbreaking”, had to stop. The website for the Forced Labour Lab, Murphy’s small team of researchers at the HKC, was taken down – although several of the reports remain available in other, less visible parts of the university archive.
In October, the university said it was lifting the ban on Murphy’s work on China and forced labour, and apologised.
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Appalling. One of Bridget Phillipson’s first acts was to axe the part of our Free Speech Act which would expose foreign funding in our universities.