Turkmenistan
and Uzbekistan downgraded in annual anti-trafficking report
(Washington,
DC): Today the U.S. State Department gave the governments of both Uzbekistan
and Turkmenistan well-deserved downgrades to Tier 3, the lowest possible
ranking, in its annual Trafficking in
Persons (TIP) Report. Both governments continue to coercively mobilize
citizens to grow and harvest cotton each year in two of the world’s largest
remaining systems of state-sponsored forced labor. The decisions were lauded in
a letter sent today to Secretary of State John Kerry
by the Cotton Campaign.
“The U.S.
Government is to be commended for holding these government accountable for
their pervasive abuses of human rights,” said Nadejda Ataeva, president of the
Association for Human Rights in Central Asia. “Today, the State Department sent
a strong message that states that use violence and fear to coerce citizens into
forced labor belong on the lowest tier of the report’s rankings.”
The 2015 Uzbek cotton harvest was marked by a dramatic rise in attacks against
independent civil society monitors, as reported in the Uzbek-German Forum for
Human Rights’ annual reporting on the cotton harvest. Elena Urlaeva endured multiple detentions with invasive body
cavity searches, Uktam Pardaev was arrested and placed under a form of house
arrest, and Dmitri Tihonov was forced to flee after his house was burned down
and he was threatened with arrest. As these monitors documented, the Uzbek
government’s forced labor system continued unchanged from previous years.
Officials forced more than a million Uzbek citizens to grow and harvest cotton under
threat of penalty including loss of work or social security benefits, expulsion
from school, and fines. Teachers, medical professionals and other public
servants are particularly impacted, and public services such as education and
healthcare are severely limited during the cotton harvest.
Forced labor in
cotton production in Turkmenistan is also state-orchestrated, systematic and
widespread. According to reports from the Alternative Turkmenistan News, the Turkmen government forces farmers
to deliver state-established annual cotton production quotas and thousands of
workers to pick cotton under threats of loss of land, employment or wages.
Forced-labor cotton production was noted as a reason for Tier 3 designations in
the country reports for both Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.
“It is
absolutely shocking these egregious worker rights abuses have persisted so
long,” said Cathy Feingold, director of International Affairs for the AFL-CIO.
“It is incumbent on governments and international institutions to firmly press the
Uzbek and Turkmen governments to end forced-labor cotton production, and the
United States took a positive step toward that goal today.”
Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan
are the world’s fifth- and seventh-highest exporters of cotton, respectively.
The Uzbek and Turkmen governments both funnel hundreds of millions of dollars
from annual cotton sales, by conservative estimates, into non-transparent,
unaccountable funds only accessible to government elite. The cotton makes its
way through opaque global supply chains and eventually winds up in the products
of well-known global brands.
“With this
year’s report, the US government sent the right message to the Uzbek and Turkmen
governments,” said Pat Zerega, senior director of shareholder advocacy, Mercy
Investment Services. “Progress towards fulfilling a state’s duty to protect its
citizens’ right to freedom from forced labor must start with the state itself
not using forced labor. We now urge the US government to use the report
rankings to press the Uzbek and Turkmen governments to eliminate
state-orchestrated forced labor in their cotton sectors.”
For more
information and recommendations on how the U.S. Government can effectively
advocate for an end to state-sponsored forced labor in cotton, please see the Cotton Campaign’s letter to Secretary of State
Kerry.
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The Cotton Campaign is a global coalition of
labour, human rights, investor and business organizations to end forced labour
of children and adults in the cotton sector of Uzbekistan.
