The United States is rallying the world’s democracies to deliver for our people, meet the world’s biggest challenges, and demonstrate our shared values
Today President Biden and leaders from G7 will demonstrate that we are unified by our shared values and a collective resolve among major democracies to meet today’s challenges. President Biden and leaders agreed to a set of concrete actions around key priorities responding to forced labor in global supply chains, the ransomware threat, and fighting corruption.
United States and G7 Commit to Removing Forced Labor from Global Supply Chains: The United States and our G7 partners remain deeply concerned by the use of all forms of forced labor in global supply chains, including state-sponsored forced labor of vulnerable groups and minorities and supply chains of the agricultural, solar, and garment sectors—the main supply chains of concern in Xinjiang. Leaders agreed on the importance of upholding human rights and of international labor standards, and committed to protect individuals from forced labor. We welcome the commitment of our G7 partners to ensure all global supply chains are free from the use of forced labor. We look forward to identifying areas for strengthened cooperation and collective efforts to eradicate the use of all forms of forced labor in global supply chains, in accordance with international and national law.
Commitment to Fight Ransomware: Ransomware is a longstanding global challenge, and the threat continues to escalate in both scale and sophistication. In just the last few weeks there have been several significant cyber intrusions affecting many G7 and other nations’ critical infrastructure, manufacturing and electronics firms, and hospitals. These transnational criminal enterprises leverage infrastructure, virtual currency, and money laundering networks, and target victims all over the globe, often operating from geographic locations that offer a permissive environment for carrying out such malicious cyber activities. The international community—both governments and private sector actors—must work together to ensure that critical infrastructure is resilient against this threat, that malicious cyber activity is investigated and prosecuted, that we bolster our collective cyber defenses, and that States address the criminal activity taking place within their borders. The United States and our G7 partners are committed to working together to urgently address the escalating shared threat from criminal ransomware networks.
Taking Collective Action to Combat Corruption: On June 3, 2021 President Biden declared efforts to curb corruption a core U.S. national interest, and issued a National Security Study Memorandum on the Fight Against Corruption to elevate this vital work. Corruption corrodes public trust; makes government less effective; wastes public resources; and eats away at the foundations of democratic societies. Corruption exerts a massive cost on economies and is fundamentally unfair to citizens. As a group of the world’s leading economies, G7 members must do more to make sure that proceeds of corruption do not end up in untraceable accounts, obscured by shell companies or in real estate.
Together with our G7 partners, the United States is resolved to taking meaningful actions to effectively combat corruption, such as tackling the misuse of shell companies, limiting the ability of bad actors to launder dirty money in real estate purchases, improving corruption-related information sharing, and reforming foreign assistance to focus on anticorruption as a cross-cutting priority. We welcome the G7 commitment to take collective action in combatting corruption.
More detail will be included in the G7 Leaders’ Communique.
###
