European furniture giants IKEA, XXXLutz and others are accused of violating the embargo on the import of wood and furniture from Belarus due to the war in Ukraine.
In addition, some of these products are manufactured using forced work of prisoners in colonies, activist Svyatoslav Amelin reports on Facebook.
He expressed the hope that this will add incentives to the world to finally abandon furniture from Russia and Belarus.
Politico noted that the sale of wood plays an important role in the economy of Belarus, and the country's forests are state property.
French Disclose investigation revealed that many of the products sold by the Swedish furniture giant IKEA were made using forced labor in Belarusian prisons for years. For example, in 2019, Ikea supplier Mogotex purchased textiles from the IC-2 juvenile detention center. From 2006 to 2014, the head of the colony was under EU sanctions due to the inhumane treatment of political prisoners. People who worked in IC-2 received from 2 to 5 rubles per month, that is, less than €2.
The article emphasized that the regime of the self-proclaimed president of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, forces prisoners, including political prisoners, to work hard, using them as free labor. Many of them were convicted for participating in marches, supporting Ukraine or criticizing Lukashenka.
The authors emphasized that the EU included the import of furniture from Belarus in the package of sanctions in April 2022.
According to an IKEA spokesperson, in June 2021 the company decided to stop developing any new business in Belarus due to the human rights situation, because it does not accept human rights violations in its supply chain. However, the war in Ukraine and international sanctions "accelerated" the plan to leave the Belarusian market. IKEA terminated contracts with its Belarusian suppliers in June 2022.
The article noted that this is not the first scandal with IKEA . So in 2012, the company admitted to buying products made by political prisoners in the former East Germany in the 1970s and 1980s.
Earlier, EcoPolitic wrote, that the IKEA company is suspected of using illegal wood from the Carpathian forests. This caused the indignation of the Swedish community, and the Ukrainian authorities "do not notice" the problem.
As EcoPolitic previously reported, leading global companies, including Google, Amazon, IKEA, Apple and Nestle, are not achieving their own goals in the fight against climate change and regularly exaggerate or misreport their progress.
