Laura T. Murphy

Laura T. Murphy is a senior associate in the Human Rights Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. She was an adviser to the under secretary for policy in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) during the Biden administration. At DHS, she supported the inter-agency Forced Labor Enforcement Task Force and other agencies on policy, research, and international stakeholder engagement regarding forced labor, with a primary focus on the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. She is professor of human rights and contemporary slavery at the Helena Kennedy Centre for International Justice at Sheffield Hallam University. Her academic research focuses on forced labor globally, with a particular emphasis on forced labor in supply chains and survivor/worker voice. She is a human rights and policy expert, dedicated to building and sharing a robust evidence base that exposes forced labor abuses in critical supply chains and elevates the voices of workers and survivors. Her work is primarily focused on identifying the negative human, supply chain, and environmental impacts of rights violations globally and exposing the systems that make these abuses so pervasive. Her research team published a series of reports and evidence briefs about forced labor in China that investigated international supply chains connected to Uyghur forced labor, including in the renewable energy, critical minerals, automotive, apparel, agriculture, and chemicals sectors. In addition to her work on China, she has conducted research on forced labor in India, Nigeria, Ghana, the United States, and Canada and is the author of numerous books and academic articles on the subject.