Many of the world's biggest fashion brands and retailers are complicit in the forced labour and human rights violations being perpetrated on millions of Uighur people in the Xinjiang region of northwestern China, says a coalition of more than 180 human rights groups.

Just one member of his cabinet, Foreign Affairs Minister Marc Garneau, appeared in parliament for the vote. Speaking in the House of Commons, Mr Garneau said he had abstained "on behalf of the government of Canada".

More than half a million people from ethnic minority groups in Xinjiang have been coerced into picking cotton, on a scale far greater than previously thought, new research has suggested.

Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size China is pushing hundreds of thousands of Tibetans into forced labour camps, mirroring a program in the western Xinjiang region, as the International Olympic Committee is urged to strip Beijing of the Winter Olympics.