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Time to Drive Child Labour From Value Chains
Patricia Jurewicz, director of the Responsible Sourcing Network, a project of As You Sow, has an op-ed piece at ethicalcorp.com, Time to Drive Child Labour From Value Chains:
During the recent International Cotton and Textile Fair in Tashkent, not a single western buyer signed a contract for Uzbekistan’s cotton, according to a report in the [...]
Actions, Not Words in Uzbekistan
Jeff Goldstein, a senior policy analyst at the Open Society Foundations, has a letter to the editor in The Washington Post critiquing the statement from a senior State Department official claiming that Uzbekistan’s President Islam Karimov wants to introduce democratic reforms.
The statement was made during a briefing for the press while Secretary of State Hillary [...]
US Advocates Against Child Labour Appeal to Clinton on Eve of Visit to Uzbekistan
Advocates against the use of forced child labour in Uzbekistan spoke out again today in an appeal to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on the eve of her trip to Central Asia.
Twenty representatives of American trade unions, labor and human rights groups, investors, brands and retailers called on Secretary Clinton to raise with Uzbek [...]
How Many Children Are Working in the Cotton Fields in Uzbekistan?
Organizations working in the campaign against forced child labour have estimated the number of children working in the cotton fields to be from 1.5 million to 2 million. These estimates were made on the basis of extrapolation of numbers based on surveys of limited areas. Recently, two new sources became available which help confirm [...]
Be Not Afraid of Growing Slowly, Just of Activists Seeing Your Agenda
Last week, the American-Uzbekistan Chamber of Commerce boasted on its website that it was upgrading its annual American-Uzbek Business Forum in light of positive developments in bilateral relations:
Due to the positive developments during the recent Annual Bilateral Consultations between the Governments of the United States of America and the Republic of Uzbekistan, the Uzbek Government [...]
Activists to Picket AmChan Meeting in DC; Uzbek Foreign Minister, US DAS to Speak
Plans are proceeding apace for a picket of a business meeting of the American Uzbekistan Chamber of Commerce (AUCC) this week.
On Wednesday, September 28 at noon at the W Hotel in Washington, DC, a number of human rights and labor groups plan to protest the use of child forced labour in the cotton industry as [...]
US Embassy, UNICEF Minimized Forced Child Labour, Argued Against Boycott
The new WikiLeaks dump of alleged diplomatic cables contains numerous dispatches from Tashkent with troubling new revelations about the downplaying of the issue of forced child labour in the cotton industry in Uzbekistan by both the US Embassy and the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), apparently driven by the need to keep good relations with Uzbekistan.
The [...]
Coalition of Unions, Retailers, Human Rights Groups Appeal to Clinton on Failure to Downgrade Uzbekistan
A coalition of unions, retailers, labor and human rights groups have issued an open letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressing concern at the failure to downgrade Uzbekistan to Tier 3 on the US Watchlist in the State Department’s report on Global Trafficking in Persons (G-TIP), released this week. The letter, signed by 18 [...]
Uzbekistan Remains on US Watch List for Child Labor
The US State Department Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons has released its annual report titled Global Trafficking in Persons (G-TIP).
Uzbekistan is included in G-TIP as in past years, and remains on the Tier 2 Watch List due to failure to eliminate the state-sponsored practice of forced child labor in the cotton industry. [...]
US G-TIP Policy on Uzbekistan Sparks Conservative Critique
The Jamestown Foundation Eurasia Daily Monitor has published a disturbing two-part article by Umida Hashimova, “US Repeats Policy Mistakes in Uzbekistan,” on the issue of forced child labor in Uzbekistan. The author, originally from Uzbekistan herself, claims the issue of child labor in her homeland is misrepresented and exaggerated, and implies that those who take [...]
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REPORTS
Download 2010 SOAS Report What Has Changed
The production and export of cotton continues to be a major feature of the economy, politics and everyday lives of the people of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. This report analyses the nature and causes of their use of child labour in the cotton sector.