In Uzbekistan, where public employees are forced to work in harvests, the Solidarity Center joins with coalition partners to end forced labor. Credit: Timur Karpov.
In Uzbekistan, the Solidarity Center supports civil society efforts to combat forced labor in the country’s annual cotton harvest where, as recently as 2015, the Uzbek government forced 1 million doctors, teachers, nurses, students and private-sector workers to harvest cotton.
The Solidarity Center works with the Cotton Campaign, a coalition of labor rights and human rights organizations, whose efforts have led to elimination of child labor and a significant reduction in forced labor in Uzbekistan’s cotton harvest.
Through the Cotton Campaign, the Solidarity Center pushes for complete elimination of all forms of forced labor, including recent moves by the government to compel teachers and other public-sector employees to clean highways and perform other public maintenance work. With its partners, the Solidarity Center calls on the Uzbek government to implement and enforce the right of all agricultural workers to form, join, and participate in democratic labor unions of their own choosing and allow independent journalists and human rights defenders to monitor cotton labor without fear of reprisals, coercion or intimidation.
Uzbek human rights defender Elena Urlaeva was released from a psychiatric hospital in Tashkent yesterday where she was imprisoned for 23 days with neither her consent nor a court order to forcibly treat her, according to the Cotton Campaign. Urlaeva’s release follows...
In the past month, journalists and human rights activists in Uzbekistan have been arrested, interrogated and even beaten for documenting conditions of forced labor and raising awareness among workers about their rights during the country’s annual cotton harvest. Every...
At least one person has died in Uzbekistan cotton fields so far this season, part of the country’s massive mobilization of compulsory labor in which nurses, teachers, students and state employees are forced from clinics and classrooms to toil for weeks picking cotton....
