Saturday, December 18, 2010

Will Europe do anything about child slave labour in Uzbekistan?


As someone who prefers to buy cotton clothes I have sometimes thought about the apparently back-breaking work of picking cotton plants from out of the ground.

The mental picture of children (as young as our 9-year old son) being dragged from school only to spend hour after hour twisting their bodies in the fields is a very disturbing one.

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from reduced trading tariffs for its cotton imports to the EU despite its own rules that these benefits should be withdrawn.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.

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