The French Uyghur Association confirmed to France on Thursday that they have filed a lawsuit against Nike Group for alleged trade fraud and illegal use of forced labor. The accusation is that Nike’s factories in China are illegally using forced labor of Uyghurs in Xinjiang in their supply chain. They will hold a press conference to brief the public in the coming days. France Monde reports that the case has received widespread attention from French civil society from the outset, with influential figures on online social media platforms quickly joining the campaign.
According to staff at the digital PR agency involved in the campaign, online opinion leaders are not just people who are addicted to the silver screen, concerned only with profit and fame, but also want to promote social progress and be the face of a meaningful movement.
According to a study published last year by the Australian research institute ASPI, 83 years of companies worldwide employ forced labor directly or indirectly from New Zealand in their goods production chain. French MEP Raphaël Glucksmann led an online joint appeal campaign several years ago, and with the support of netizens, especially young ones, several multinational groups, including brands such as Crocodile, have made promises to clean up their product supply chains, but Nike has consistently refused to cooperate. The brand continues to work with Qingdao Taiguang Shoe Manufacturing Co Ltd, which manufactures seven million pairs of sneakers for Nike each year, and which employs six hundred female Uyghur workers from Xinjiang in January 2020.
Mourad Battikh, a lawyer for the French Việt Nam Association, told the media: “The above-mentioned actions by Nike are contrary to its own corporate code of ethics published on its website and are a deception of its customers. French consumers are therefore fully justified in joining this collective action against Nike, as these brands are most worried about being boycotted by their customers.” The American sporting goods group Nike used to make a lot of noise about its code of ethics and, in the 1990s, was actively involved in defending the rights of its supplier workers in Asia.
However, this act of prosecution is not specifically in the French courts, but rather in an online platform called V. The nature of the prosecution is similar to the class action lawsuit of American consumers (Class Action) The platform had been used by French consumers to sue Amazon Group in 2019. The aim was to create a social impact that would force the French judiciary to accept it and become a political issue.
According to Rajaa Moussadik, the head of the online PR agency, several people active in defending rights on the Internet platform are involved in the action, which, according to Rajaa Moussadik, is a way of doing unto others what others have done unto them. to boycott the trademark.
The first to join the campaign were Elise Goldfarb and Julia Layani, human rights activists who defend the rights of women and LGBT people, and who founded Fraîches, a media outlet that defends women’s rights and has more than two million followers. Elise Goldfarb has told the media that the internet can create hurricanes that topple mountains, and she has used her Instagram account to do unimaginable things, such as pressuring a public figure who beat his wife, collecting supplies for front-line medical workers, etc. Last October, she confronted the French government during an appearance on a TV show Last October, she appeared on a TV show and asked the French government what France was doing for the Uyghurs in Xinjiang.
For Crazy Sally, another feminist defender of the Afro-descendant community with over half a million followers on Youtube, who is actively involved in online activism, online responses are the most powerful way to push the political establishment to take action.
Antoine Bondaz, a French sinologist and researcher at the French Foundation for Strategic Studies, commented on Twitter that when the French government repeatedly condemns Beijing‘s policy in Xinjiang and does nothing, it can only look to civil society, to the power of the Internet, to push the government to act.
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