Brussels, 15/06/2011 (Agence Europe) - To mark the World Day against Child Labour on 12 June, human rights NGOs called for an international inquiry to be carried out on child labour in the cotton industry in Uzbekistan. A request passed on from the Commission by a cross-party group of 16 MEPs calls for the preferences granted by the EU to the former USSR to be suspended if such allegations are proven.
The NGOs Anti-Slavery International and International Labour Rights Forum stirred things up on Sunday by denouncing during the annual ILO conference on child labour that Uzbek children were being forced to work during the autumn cotton harvesting period. A cross-party group of MEPs immediately took the issue before the European Commission, demanding an investigation into breach of human rights clauses attached to special trade concessions granted to Uzbekistan by the EU under the EU's General System of Preferences (GSP), which grant the third largest world producer of cotton preferential access to the Community market for its exports.
In a letter addressed to Commissioner Karel De Gucht, MEPs write that half the cotton produced in Uzbekistan is harvested each year at the request of the state by hundreds of thousands of children, the youngest being no more than 9 years old, in order to offset the shortage of adult labour. MEPs, who denounce this as a “modern day form of slavery” also deplore the fact that children who fail to meet their targets or run away are beaten or threatened with expulsion from school.
“Taking children out of school and forcing them to work on the cotton fields is an absolute breach of their human rights. It flies in the face of the international human rights agreements that Uzbekistan and all EU countries have signed up to. Europe's trade policy should reward protectors of human rights, not those who ignore them”, said Catherine Bearder (ALDE, UK) with indignation. MEPs therefore call on the Commission to freeze the preferences granted to cotton from Uzbekistan, if the allegations are proven to be correct.
So far, Tashkent has always denied using forced child labour and has still not given permission for an ILO fact-finding mission to investigate in the country. (E.H./transl.jl)