The Guardian
Exclusive: Leading professor at Sheffield Hallam was told to cease research on supply chains and forced labour in China after demands from authorities
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.
But the eight-month stoppage – and the abandonment of previous research – reveals the chilling effect that pressure from the Chinese authorities can have on UK universities.
“My first response was confusion,” Murphy said. The university told her that a combination of administrative issues meant they could no longer support her work. But further inquiries suggested the university was “explicitly trading my academic freedom for access to the Chinese student market,” Murphy said, which was “really shocking”. The university denies that the decision was based on commercial interests.
The instruction for Murphy to halt her research came six months after the university decided to abandon a planned report on the risk of Uyghur forced labour in the critical minerals supply chain, and return the funding associated with that research to the original grantor, Global Rights Compliance (GRC), a non-profit law foundation based in The Hague. GRC eventually published the research in June this year.
“It is a problem that Sheffield Hallam is no longer publishing this research,” said Lara Strangways, the head of business and human rights at Global Rights Compliance. “There were obviously going to then be questions raised about why we ended up publishing it.”
In October, after threats of legal action from Murphy for violating her academic freedom, Sheffield Hallam lifted restrictions. But Murphy said she remained “cautious”.
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