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On Eve of ILO Review, Uzbek GONGOs Deny Child Labor Problem
On the eve of a review by the International Labour Organization concerning Uzbekistan’s failure to stop forced child labor, the Uzbek government has made a last-ditch effort to claim it was controlling the problem, fergananews.com reported.
On June 2, the Council of Federations of Unions of Uzbekistan and the Association of Farms, both state-controlled organizations, and [...]
Uzbek Government Forms Working Group on Forced Child Labor — But Still No Invitation to the ILO
The Uzbek government has announced the formation of a new working group to ensure no forced child labor is used in Uzbekistan, centralasiannewswire.com reported, citing UzDaily.com, an Uzbek pro-government online business daily.
Yet Tashkent has still not issued an invitation to the International Labor Organization (ILO) to visit Uzbekistan during the cotton harvest season in the [...]
Who Will Monitor Forced Child Labor in Uzbekistan? ILO Still Barred by Uzbek Government
Who will monitor the use of forced child labor in Uzbekistan this year? With the International Labor Organization (ILO) still not permitted to enter Uzbekistan, with Human Rights Watch kicked out of Uzbekistan, with local groups increasingly under fire from the dictatorial regime of President Islam Karimov, the job of telling the truth about the [...]
Stunning footage from the Uzbek-German Forum
Uzbek-German Forum for Human Rights: 2009 cotton harvest
Beyond documentation of the youth and vulnerability of those exploited this past year, this footage shows so clearly what miserable work children are forced to do. You can hear in the audio the sounds of the pods and branches scratching their hands and tearing at their clothes.
The harvest is (mostly) in, but at what price?
This is the question posed earlier this month by the Association for Human Rights in Central Asia. That group’s press release of November 4 broke the stories of deaths and injuries suffered earlier in the harvest. More than just breaking news, the group points out the total complicity of institutions that, in a non-totalitarian society [...]
More retribution
This just in from the Rapid Response Group, a coalition of Uzbek human rights activists. Ganihon Mamakhanov, whose trial starts today, is a Fergana-based activist, arrested at the height of the cotton harvest (October 10) on trumped up charges after local police planted evidence on him. The implications are clear for those brave individuals trying [...]
Retribution
Uzbekistan’s government has never taken too kindly to those who would expose its crimes against its own people. The brave people documenting the forced labor of children in the cotton harvest are no exception. The BBC reports the latest violence against one of them here.
Expelled for being sickened by cotton
It’s worth reading through the entire (slightly redacted) message below from the Human Rights Society of Uzbekistan, just to get a sense of the Orwellian humiliations people in Uzbekistan must endure during their annual “cotton campaign.” This student was lucky enough to get reinstated in her institute, from which she was expelled for having [...]
Uzbek activists call for boycott–again!
If anyone has yet to be convinced that boycotting Uzbek cotton is the right thing to do, they need to listen to the people who are putting everything on the line to call for just that: Uzbekistan’s human rights activists, both in-country and political exiles. These are the people whose friends, neighbors and families are [...]
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REPORTS
Download 2012 CEGG Report Forced Child Labour in Uzbekistan
The state-controlled forced labor system of cotton production in Uzbekistan continues to violate the human rights of Uzbek children and adults in order to support the central government with revenues from cotton exports. This report identifies alarming trends of the most recent harvests, including the increased tendencies of civil servants forced to pick cotton and children forced to work the most difficult and dangerous end of the harvest. The report calls for an ILO monitoring mission and action from the governments of the European Union and the U.S., the World Bank, and the private sector to stop forced labor in the cotton sector of Uzbekistan.