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| Florence Widdicombe, 6, at her home in Tooting, south London, writing in a Tesco Christmas card from the same pack as a card she found contained a message from a Chinese prisoner |
China denied accusations of forced labour at a Shanghai prison on Monday, a day after media reports that a young girl had found a message in a Christmas card saying it had been packed by inmates.
The Sunday Times newspaper said the message in the charity card sold by British supermarket giant Tesco read: “We are foreign prisoners in Shanghai Qingpu Prison China. Forced to work against our will.”
It said the message urged whoever received it to contact Peter Humphrey, a British former journalist and corporate fraud investigator who was imprisoned in the same jail from 2014-2015.
Tesco suspended the Chinese supplier of Christmas cards on Sunday after a press report said a customer found a message written inside a card saying it had been packed by foreign prisoners who were victims of forced labour.
“We abhor the use of prison labour and would never allow it in our supply chain,” a Tesco spokesman said on Sunday.
“We were shocked by these allegations and immediately suspended the factory where these cards are produced and launched an investigation. We have also withdrawn these cards from sale whilst we investigate.”
Tesco, Britain’s biggest retailer, donates £300,000 a year from the sale of the cards to the charities British Heart Foundation, Cancer Research UK and Diabetes UK.
The Sunday Times said the message inside the card read: “We are foreign prisoners in Shanghai Qingpu Prison China. Forced to work against our will. Please help us and notify human rights organisation.
“Use the link to contact Mr Peter Humphrey.”
The cards were produced at the Zheijiang Yunguang Printing factory, about 100km from Shanghai Qingpu prison, Tesco said.
The company, which prints cards and books for food and pharmaceutical companies, says on its website it supplies Tesco.
A staff member who answered the company’s main telephone line on Monday told Reuters they were unaware of the press reports or Tesco’s comments. She declined to provide her name. The company did not respond to further emailed requests for comment.
Humphrey and his American wife Yu Yingzeng were both sentenced in China in 2014 for illegally obtaining private records of Chinese citizens and selling the information to clients including drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline. The couple were deported from China in June 2015 after their jail terms were reduced.
The message inside the card was found by a 6-year-old girl, Florence Widdicombe, in London. Her father, Ben Widdicombe, contacted Humphrey via the LinkedIn social network.
Florence Widdicombe said she was “shocked” to see the message in the card. “We opened them about a week ago and we were writing in them, and on about my sixth or eighth card, somebody had already written in it,” she told BBC TV.
Her father said at first he thought the note was a prank, but he later realised it was potentially a serious matter and he felt a responsibility to pass it on to Peter Humphrey as requested and contected him via LinkedIn.
Writing in the Sunday Times, Humphrey said he did not know the identities or the nationalities of the prisoners who put the note into the card, but he “had no doubt they are Qingpu prisoners who knew me before my release in June 2015 from the suburban prison where I spent 23 months”.
China‘s Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang told a press briefing: “I can responsibly say, according to the relevant organs, Shanghai’s Qingpu prison does not have this issue of foreign prisoners being forced to work.”
He dismissed the whole story as “a farce created by Mr Humphrey”. Humphrey did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the ministry’s statement.
Humphrey spent 23 months in prison on charges of illegally obtaining private records of Chinese citizens and selling the information to clients including drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline.
REUTERS
