Anti-Slavery International and the Environmental Justice Foundation (EJF) are demanding that high-street giants H&M and Zara stop selling clothes made with cotton from Uzbekistan, a country where around half of all cotton is picked by forced child labour, following an investigation that links Uzbek cotton to products from both companies. Despite assurances from the Uzbekistan government that forced child labour was outlawed in 2008, Anti-Slavery International and EJF have obtained images of children picking cotton taken secretly during Uzbekistan’s 2009 cotton harvest, which ended at the beginning of December. Each year, the Uzbekistan government closes schools and forces more than 200,000 school children into the cotton fields during the three-month long harvest.

An investigation carried out by the human rights magazine Independent World Report uncovered that Beximco Textiles (Bextex) in Bangladesh, a supplier to Inditex (the owner of high street chains Zara and Bershka), admitted that 45-50 per cent of their raw cotton was imported from Uzbekistan. The same investigation also uncovered that H&M’s Bangladeshi suppliers deal directly with Bextex. » Read more: Stop Cotton imports from Uzbekistan