Cotton crimes petition

The 2011 cotton harvest has begun and fresh evidence of child slavery in Uzbekistan’s cotton fields has emerged. Once again, government officials are closing down schools and forcing children, some as young as nine years old, out of their classrooms and into the fields to pick cotton.

Children in Uzbekistan do not have a choice regarding cotton picking. They are  given daily quotas and if they fail to meet them they can be punished by beatings, detention or told that their grades will suffer. Children can also be left exhausted and suffering from ill-health and malnutrition after weeks of arduous labour.

Uzbekistan’s booming cotton industry, which is the 3rd biggest exporter in the world, is reliant on the use of hundreds of thousands of children in slavery during the three-month harvest each year.

The single biggest destination for Uzbek cotton is the European market. Despite strong condemnation from the European Union over the use of child slavery in Uzbek cotton production, the EU continues to allow the Government of Uzbekistan to benefit from reduced trading tariffs for its cotton imports to the EU despite its own rules that these benefits should be withdrawn.

SIGN THE PETITION calling on the EU to remove trade preferences for uzbekistan to stop child slavery

Dear Jerzy Buzek, President of the European Parliament

We, the undersigned, call upon the European Union to implement its own rules and immediately remove Uzbekistan’s preferential trade tariffs for cotton imported to the EU in light of the ongoing use of state-sponsored child slavery in the country’s cotton industry.

14948 PETITION SIGNATURES IN TOTAL (including offline)

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