"using a forced-labour investigation to advance what analysts see as a bid to rebuild its tariff regime after recent court setbacks" [court setbacks]
The phrase directly names the mechanism: forced-labour law is being instrumentalized not primarily for labor rights enforcement but to reconstruct a tariff regime that was legally undermined, confirming the structural repurposing of human rights frameworks.
Reasoning from this article
The article reveals that the US is applying Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 against 60 economies simultaneously under a forced-labour rationale, a scope far exceeding any targeted labor-rights enforcement logic. The breadth—China, EU, Japan, India, South Korea, Australia, Canada, Mexico, Vietnam—signals that the legal vehicle is being used as a universal tariff instrument. This generalizes beyond the current administration: once a statutory pathway survives legal challenge, it becomes a template for future administrations to impose broad trade barriers under human rights cover, structurally entangling trade and labor/rights policy in ways that are difficult for trading partners to contest at the WTO.