A group of US politicians is demanding answers from a US electronics company over concerns that it is using forced labour at a facility in the southern Chinese city of Qinzhou. The legislators said Arizona-based Universal Electronics Inc. is reportedly using hundreds of ethnic Uyghur labourers through an agreement with the Xinjiang government.

In a letter to the company, they wrote that the Chinese government has long used forced labour to subjugate the Uyghur population.

There are about 12 million Uyghurs, mostly Muslim, living in Xinjiang province in North West China.

“Given these ongoing, well-documented abuses, American companies must scrupulously avoid forced Uyghur labor in their Chinese operations, including by carefully vetting arrangements with third-party labor agents,” according to the letter. “The new reports indicate Universal Electronics may be failing in this duty.”

The letter also noted the Uyghurs employed in Qinzhou live in segregated dormitories and are continuously surveilled by police and made to participate in government “education activities.”

“We are especially troubled that Universal Electronics appears to have done little to investigate or remedy the situation,” the letter said. “According to Reuters, your spokesperson confirmed that Universal Electronics ‘does not conduct independent due diligence on where and how its workers are trained in Xinjiang’ and ‘does not know how the workers are trained in Xinjiang or who pays for their transport.’”

US senators sending the letter were Bob Menendez, Marco Rubio and Jeff Merkley.