 Yesterday, we went to the Uzbek Embassy in Washington to educate attendees to its dinner reception about the Uzbek government's use of forced labor. The government of Uzbekistan's event was postponed until October 22.
We'll be back. Join us! See details below, and use this flyer to invite your friends. Date: Thursday, October 22, 2015 - 6:30pm Location: Uzbek Embassy in the United States 1746 Massachusetts Ave NW, Washington D.C. The Uzbek government is throwing a fancy dinner at its Embassy in Washington, D.C., to showcase Uzbek food, culture and heritage to invited guests. We want to make sure party-goers also learn about the yearly ritual of forced labor that Uzbek citizens must endure at the hands of their own government. Please join us for a pre-party on the streets outside the embassy to speak out against forced labor in the Uzbek cotton harvest! The government of Uzbekistan operates the largest state-orchestrated forced labor systems of cotton production in the world. Annually, the Uzbek authorities force farmers to grow cotton and more than a million school teachers, doctors, nurses and other citizens to harvest it, all under threat of punishment. Profits from cotton sales solely benefit the government elite, and the Uzbek government threatens, detains and assaults citizens who attempt to report this human rights abuse. Call on the Government of Uzbekistan to stop its use of forced labor! For decades, the Uzbek authorities have claimed that cotton work is a national duty and an Uzbek tradition. Join us for the White Gold Pre-Party street action to inform guests about the Uzbek government's use of forced labor and to demand the end of this human rights crisis!
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World Bank: Uzbekistan Strategy Must Address Government Policies that Constrain Development8/28/2015 The World Bank is currently developing its strategy in Uzbekistan for the period 2016-2020. The first step of the Bank's process is to conduct an "assessment of the constraints a country has to address and the opportunities it can embrace to accelerate progress toward the goals of ending extreme poverty and promoting shared prosperity in ways that are environmentally, socially and fiscally sustainable," known as the Systematic Country Diagnostic.
Today the Cotton Campaign submitted recommendations to the World Bank for its Uzbekistan SCD. We noted that the World Bank has substantial leverage with the government of Uzbekistan. To achieve the World Bank’s twin goals of “of ending extreme poverty and promoting shared prosperity in ways that are environmentally, socially and fiscally sustainable” in Uzbekistan, it is incumbent on the World Bank to use its leverage to end the practices of its member the Uzbek government that ensure the impoverishment of the people of Uzbekistan, including systematic forced labor, repression of civil society, and corruption. The World Bank’s Systematic Country Diagnostic (SCD) is the opportunity to analyze the actual economic and social trends in Uzbekistan and establish the analytical framework to guide the World Bank’s strategy to achieve its twin goals. Unfortunately the World Bank’s power point titled “Online Consultation for the Preparation of the Uzbekistan Systematic Country Diagnostic” (hereinafter “power point”) fails to properly analyze the economic situation in the country because it virtually ignores the role played by the Uzbek government in manipulating the economy for the benefit of elites. This must be remedied in the SCD for Uzbekistan. Thus, it is vital that the World Bank account for the following key issues, explained in the subsequent text:
Read the full submission to the World Bank for its Uzbekistan SCD here. Today the Cotton Campaign submitted to the International Labour Organization (ILO) Committee of Experts on the Application of Conventions and Recommendations (CEACR) evidence of violations of the ILO Convention No. 105 on the Abolition of Forced Labour by the governments of Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. Annually, the CEACR publishes an assessment of ILO member states' application of international labor conventions, based on information received, typically through August of the prior year. Throughout the reporting period for the next CEACR report, the governments of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan forced farmers to fulfill production quotas and other citizens to fulfill harvest quotas, under threat of penalty and in violation of ILO Convention No. 105 on the Abolition of Forced Labour. The reports present evidence of the Uzbek and Turkmen government-orchestrated systems of forced labour that was gathered by independent human rights monitors in each country.
Read the reports here: Report to the International Labour Organization Committee of Experts on the Application of Conventions and Recommendations concerning the Government of Uzbekistan’s Non-Compliance with ILO Convention No. 105 on Abolition of Forced Labour (ratified 1997), 25 August 2015 Report to the International Labour Organization Committee of Experts on the Application of Conventions and Recommendations concerning the Government of Turkmenistan’s Non-Compliance with ILO Convention No. 105 on Abolition of Forced Labour (ratified 1997), 25 August 2015  Date: Thursday, August 27, 2015 - 6:30pm Location: Uzbek Embassy in the United States 1746 Massachusetts Ave NW, Washington D.C. The Uzbek government is throwing a fancy dinner at its Embassy in Washington, D.C., to showcase Uzbek food, culture and heritage to invited guests. We want to make sure party-goers also learn about the yearly ritual of forced labor that Uzbek citizens must endure at the hands of their own government. Please join us for a pre-party on the streets outside the embassy to speak out against forced labor in the Uzbek cotton harvest! The government of Uzbekistan operates the largest state-orchestrated forced labor systems of cotton production in the world. Annually, the Uzbek authorities force farmers to grow cotton and more than a million school teachers, doctors, nurses and other citizens to harvest it, all under threat of punishment. Profits from cotton sales solely benefit the government elite, and the Uzbek government threatens, detains and assaults citizens who attempt to report this human rights abuse. Call on the Government of Uzbekistan to stop its use of forced labor! For decades, the Uzbek authorities have claimed that cotton work is a national duty and an Uzbek tradition. Join us for the White Gold Pre-Party street action to inform guests about the Uzbek government's use of forced labor and to demand the end of this human rights crisis! Chairmen of neighborhood committees known as “mahallas” in Uzbekistan reported that the government ordered them to contribute persons to pick cotton in 2014. The local leaders, traditionally respected as elders of their community, reported the practice to the Initiative Group of Independent Human Rights Defenders of Uzbekistan (IGIHRDU).
The mahalla committee chairmen approached the IGIHRDU this summer to report on the practices of Bahodir Goibnazarova, Senator in the national parliament of Uzbekistan (“Oliy Majlis”) and the mayor (“hokim”) of the Almazar district of Tashkent region. According to the chairmen, during the 2014 cotton harvest Mr. Goibnazarova ordered them to mobilize five people to pick cotton every 10 days or to pay 400,000 soums per cotton picker. Mr. Goibnazarova then assigned two persons from each shift to work as a janitor at the district government office, known as the hokimiyat. Goibnazarova reportedly enforced the orders with verbal and physical abuse, despite the elderly age of the chairmen. The IGIHRDU published the chairmen’s report August 14, 2015. Police in Uzbekistan assaulted Elena Urlaeva, head of the Human Rights Allliance of Uzbekistan, for the second time in the last three months. Last week, the police confiscated 200 leaflets explaining national laws that prohibit forced labor from Ms. Urlaeva and left the “bravest person in Uzbekistan” with her leg in a cast.
On August 16, Ms. Urlaeva set off for the central hospital of Tashkent, where she planned to demand fair treatment for the activist Malokhat Eshonkulova. The national security service has apparently denied access to medical facilities to Ms. Eshonkulova, a former state TV journalist fired for exposing corruption and then an activist with the Birdamlik political movement who has suffered from an undiagnosed illness since 2013. As Ms. Urlaeva exited the Buyuk Ipak Yuli metro stop, police attacked her, kicked her leg, arrested her, and took her to the police station in the Mirzo Ulugbekskogo district of Tashkent. Police officer Ilyas Mustafayev proceeded to confiscate from Ms. Urlaeva 200 pamphlets that explained national laws prohibiting forced labor. Ms. Urlaeva had begun to carry and distribute the pamphlets, published by the Uzbek-German Forum for Human Rights, earlier this summer. After the police detained Ms. Urlaeva for seven hours, she left with her husband and proceeded to a medical clinic, where doctors treated her for high blood pressure and applied a plaster cast to her injured leg. Not content with their actions thus far, the police then arrived at Ms. Urlaeva’s home and demanded her husband provide a false statement about the cause of her injuries. This is the second time police have violently assaulted Elena Urlaeva in the last three months. On May 31, police arrested and brutalized her, as she was documenting systematic, government-organized forced labor in the country’s cotton fields. The latest assault occurred a week after the Uzbek government met with the International Labour Organization, World Bank and several diplomatic missions in Tashkent to discuss the government’s systematic use of forced labor to produce cotton. The Uzbek government must cease retaliation against people who attempt to document abuses and promote human rights. And it is incumbent on the international organizations and governments engaging the Uzbek government to convey that such treatment of human rights activists is completely unacceptable and will threaten the viability of future projects; to take all necessary measures to prevent reprisals against people for monitoring or reporting on human rights violations; to seek an enforceable commitment from the government that it will not interfere with independent reporting; and to end projects if any more violent attacks against human rights monitors occur. [This post was originally published in The Hill, here.]
The furor over the State Department’s decision to upgrade Malaysia in its annual Trafficking in Persons ratings – widely seen as an effort to facilitate the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade negotiations – has obscured an equally egregious case: Uzbekistan. In Uzbekistan, the government is the trafficker-in-chief, annually forcing more than a million citizens to pick cotton each year. Nonetheless, the U.S. rewarded it with an upgrade in the TIP Report, established to assess the efforts of governments to combat trafficking. Sadly, this upgrade not only fails to fully take into account the reality of the situation in Uzbekistan. It also degrades the credibility of the State Department’s report, which has become the most authoritative assessment of where governments stand on this critical issue. In 2014, the year in focus in the 2015 TIP Report, the Uzbek government forced farmers to grow cotton and at least a million teachers, doctors, nurses and other citizens to harvest it, all under threat of penalty. In only the first half of this year, it forced thousands of citizens to prepare cotton fields for planting, brutalized citizens attempting to document forced labor and deported an international labor expert simply for informing a legally registered human rights group about international labor conventions. In justifying the upgrade, the State Department cites a government decree reiterating its pre-existing law prohibiting child labor, fined school directors and farmers for child labor, signed an agreement with the International Labour Organization and did not use forced child labor nationwide to harvest cotton for the first time in 2014. What the report misses is that to replace the lost child laborers the Uzbek government simply forced more adults to work in the field, continuing a policy of shifting the demographics of forced labor without dismantling the forced labor system the government itself created. Moreover, as the report also notes, in a number of areas local officials continued to force teenagers to labor “under pressure to fulfill government-decreed cotton quotas.” As long as the Uzbek government fails to take real steps to dismantle the current system, restated commitments and selective actions on child labor simply do not represent substantial efforts to comply with the minimum standards of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, the law mandating the TIP Report. The day after the TIP report release, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported that a 58-year old woman died of heat stroke while weeding cotton fields in Uzbekistan, work she was forced to do under threat of losing her job. On July 2, 2015, a 29-year old farmer hanged himself after his mayor threatened to imprison him for not fulfilling state-assigned production quotas- the fourth farmer suicide in Uzbekistan in the last two years. On July 24, a 19-year old nurse fainted from heat stroke while weeding cotton fields under orders from their hospital administrator; temperatures that day broke 120º Fahrenheit. The people of Uzbekistan have yet to feel progress. The TIP Report carries significant weight when it presents analysis of the facts. Governments, companies, civil society around the world look to the report as an authoritative assessment of government action on human trafficking. Even recognizing the inevitable interagency debates about the political dynamics of any government report, the apparent pliability of TIP Report rankings not only degrades the credibility of the report but diminishes the utility of the report as an incentive for governments to strengthen their efforts to curtail the scourge of trafficking in all its forms, from the cotton fields of Uzbekistan to the factories of Malaysia. Perhaps the U.S. may expect the upgrade will acknowledge the limited progress recently made on child labor and encourage the Uzbek government to start taking steps to end forced labor. But that appears to be wishful thinking. Having made the unfortunate decision to upgrade Uzbekistan in the TIP Report, the burden rests squarely on the U.S. government to press the Uzbekistan authorities harder than ever. The time has run out for the “strategic patience” that Deputy Assistant Secretary for South and Central Asia Nisha Desai Biswal proposed earlier this year to guide the U.S. relationship with Uzbekistan. Now in the face of one of the largest state-run forced labor systems in the world, it is time for strategic impatience, for the U.S. to press the Uzbek government to once and for all take concrete steps to end its egregious use of forced labor. Freeman is a former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor. Niyazova is the director of the Uzbek-German Forum for Human Rights, an organization she founded as a political refugee, having been imprisoned by the Uzbek government for human rights reporting. Both work with the Cotton Campaign, a global coalition of labor, human rights, investor and business organizations coalesced to end forced labor in the cotton sector. |