Schlagwort: Amnesty International

Most factory workers who produce garments for the fashion industry are women. Studies show that women constitute 60-80% of the global garment workforce. This means that when we talk about protecting human rights in the garment and fashion industry, we must also specifically consider the rights of women. Many of the issues facing garment workers, like low wages and precarious employment, disproportionately affect women.  

Gender discrimination is rife in the garment industry. Women face a persistent wage gap, earning less than men for comparable work. They also endure rampant gender-based violence and harassment in the workplace.  

Empowering women workers is crucial for combating gender discrimination. When states and companies suppress labour rights, such as the right to form unions, they not only undermine workers’ rights but also specifically impede women’s ability to advocate for change.  

The garment industry lacks sufficient safeguards for workers, especially women workers. Empowering women workers with greater authority and decision-making opportunities to ensure that new safeguards are designed and implemented based on the genuine, lived experiences of those they aim to protect.  

Who are the workers that make garments for the fashion industry?

The garment industry provides jobs to around 94 million workers globally. Due to high levels of informal employment across the industry, it is hard to determine the precise number and gender makeup. However, the International Labour Organization estimates that between 60-80% of global garment industry workers are women.  

Asia is the largest employer of garment sector workers, accounting for 75% of all workers. Historically, China has long held the top spot for garment production and while it is still the number one producer, recent years have seen rapid industry growth across countries in South Asia.  

Most garment workers in Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka are internal migrants, predominantly young women. Many of these women moved from rural areas to the city to find employment. Without their families and support networks, they are even more vulnerable to abuse and exploitation.  

Workers with multiple, intersecting identities based on their gender, race, caste, migration status or religion face compounding discrimination.  

Why do women make up most of the workforce in the garment industry?

In many South Asian countries, garment work is seen as an opportunity for women to enter the workforce. Women and girls form the cornerstone of the garment workforce and yet they bear the brunt of its unequal pay and poor working conditions.  

Low minimum wages attract business from rich, powerful fashion brands and distributors who bring in foreign investment. Governments in many developing economies view the garment industry as a pathway to industrialization and growth. However, this economic growth, which disproportionately benefits the richest and most privileged, is often built on the exploitation of poorly paid workers who cannot access some of their most fundamental human rights. 

Those who applaud the garment industry for its role in economic growth cannot ignore how those at the helm of the garment industry, from factory managers to multinational fashion brands, fail to meet their responsibilities to workers, especially women workers.

What is it like to be a garment worker?

Human rights abuses are systemic in the garment industry.  

Workers often endure poverty wages, dangerous working conditions, and precarious employment contracts. Without a living wage they cannot access essentials like food, healthcare, clean water, education, safe housing and other economic, social, and cultural rights.  

Attempts by workers to self-organize or advocate for better conditions are often stamped out by employers and even the state. This suppression of freedoms of expression  and the right to unionize creates a climate of fear and intimidation, hindering workers’ ability to demand justice, accountability and remediation.  

What does gender discrimination look like in the garment industry?

Human rights and labour rights campaigners have highlighted an urgent need to address widespread gender discrimination in the garment industry. Women are paid far less than male workers and lack access to childcare, maternity pay and other benefits.  

Additionally, women workers face a heightened risk of gender-based violence and harassment at work. This is exacerbated by a working culture that often favours men in management positions, despite women constituting most of the workforce.  

Research in India and Bangladesh warns that male managers and supervisors often bully, harass and sexualize the women who work for them. Women from marginalized communities, such as Dalit women in India or Tamil women in Sri Lanka and Christians in Pakistan, are particularly vulnerable to such abuse.  

Harassment and violence are carried out with impunity, which in turn fuels the cycle of abuses against women workers and other marginalized people.  

There is legislation on anti-discrimination, but the problem is that there’s impunity for the perpetrators and no implementation of that legislation. Access to justice is minimal generally for women and this is doubly so with Dalit women. If women report abuse – if they go to a police station for example, then the chances are the police will also abuse them sexually in one way or another. So, cases are very, very rarely reported. 

Meena Varma from the International Dalit Solidarity Network

What needs to change to improve women’s rights in the garment industry?

A rights-based approach to reforming the garment industry must be driven by the voices of women workers themselves.  

Enabling garment workers’ right to organize and unionize is essential. Unions provide a platform for women workers to collectively address concerns about rights abuses, negotiate with employers and advocate for improved working conditions.  

Both governments and companies are responsible for implementing measures that counter gender discrimination and gender-based violence in the workplace and ensure equitable working conditions for all garment workers, including the right to freedom of association. To hold them accountable to those obligations, we need to achieve greater awareness of the human rights abuses against women in garment factories, including impartial reviews of working conditions. By unveiling the truth, we can call out factory owners, employers and states to own up to their human rights and take concrete steps to promote the rights of women garment workers.  

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Responding to the extradition of Montagnard and Ede Indigenous human rights defender Y Quynh Bdap from Thailand to Viet Nam, Amnesty International’s Thailand Researcher Chanatip Tatiyakaroonwong said:

“This extradition is a grave failure of Thailand’s human rights obligations. Sending an Indigenous activist back to a country with a well-documented pattern of torture and discrimination against Montagnards puts Y Quynh Bdap in serious danger.

“Vietnamese courts have a long track record of convicting activists in proceedings that fall far short of international fair trial standards. By handing Y Quynh Bdap over to the very authorities he fled on the basis of a conviction obtained through an unfair trial, Thailand has violated one of the most fundamental protections in international law.

“Following the return of Uyghurs to China earlier this year, this is the second time Thailand has blatantly returned people to their countries despite risks of grave human rights violations despite a domestic law prohibiting torture and non-refoulment that came into force in 2023.

“Thai authorities must ensure safety and protection for all those fleeing persecution – including Indigenous and religious minorities from Viet Nam – rather than putting them at risk of harm.”

Background

On 26 November 2025, Thailand’s Court of Appeal delivered a verdict authorizing the extradition of Y Quynh Bdap, a UN-recognized refugee who had lived in Thailand since 2018. According to Bdap’s lawyers, the verdict hearing was only scheduled one day in advance.

Bdap was removed to Viet Nam despite long-standing concerns about the safety of Indigenous activists returned there. He had been arrested for overstaying his visa in June 2024 after Vietnamese authorities requested his extradition, claiming he had been sentenced in absentia to 10 years’ imprisonment on terrorism charges earlier that year. Previously, Amnesty International had called for Thai authorities not to extradite Bdap due to high risks of torture.

Bdap, a member of the Ede ethnic minority, co-founded Montagnards Stand for Justice, an organization that documents abuses against Central Highlands Indigenous communities and advocates for their religious and cultural rights. Vietnamese authorities accused him and five other Montagnard individuals of involvement in an attack on a government building in Dak Lak province in June 2023. Bdap has consistently rejected these allegations.

Amnesty International has repeatedly documented widespread persecution of Montagnard communities who face arbitrary arrest, torture, and severe restrictions on religious practice and movement. Following the 2023 attack in Dak Lak, Montagnards reported mass detentions, security lockdowns and violent interrogations. Several people described being beaten, electrocuted or injected with unknown substances during questioning.

According to Bdap, he was tortured during an arrest in 2010, describing severe beatings and mistreatment at a police station. His account echoes patterns Amnesty International has reported for more than a decade, including cases where prisoners were confined in tiny cells for months, chained for extended periods, or given contaminated food and water.

Despite ratifying the UN Convention against Torture in 2015, Viet Nam continues to rely on abusive detention practices. Prisoners of conscience, political detainees and members of ethnic and religious minorities are particularly targeted.

Thailand’s decision to extradite Bdap also breaches its obligations under international and domestic law. The principle of non-refoulement—contained in the UN Convention against Torture and reflected in Thailand’s Act on Prevention and Suppression of Torture and Enforced Disappearance—strictly prohibits sending anyone to a country where they are in danger of torture. Despite these obligations, Thailand recently deported 40 Uyghur men to China, placing them at high risks of severe human rights violations.

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The Cuban government must put an end to institutional gender-based violence against women human rights defenders, journalists, and activists, Amnesty International said today as it launched its new report “They Want Us Silent, But We Keep Resisting: Authoritarian Practices and State Violence Against Women in Cuba.”

Amnesty International is calling on the Cuban authorities to end authoritarian practices and state gender-based violence against women human rights defenders. The report reveals that the Cuban state has implemented a systematic pattern of repression targeting women engaged in activism, journalism, and human rights defence. Such practices include arbitrary detention, unlawful surveillance, unjust criminalisation, enforced disappearance, and other forms of institutional violence — all within an environment marked by impunity for human rights violations and a lack of judicial safeguards.

“Women defenders in Cuba are punished not only for speaking out, but also for being mothers, journalists, and community leaders,” said Ana Piquer, Amnesty International’s Regional Director for the Americas. “The state wields gender-based violence as a tool of repression — seeking to break their dignity, their families, and their collective strength,” she added.

“The state wields gender-based violence as a tool of repression — seeking to break their dignity, their families, and their collective strength,”.

Ana Piquer, Amnesty International’s Regional Director for the Americas.

State Violence Rooted in Gender

Covering incidents between 2014 and 2025, the report finds that beyond authoritarian control, women are subjected to specific forms of repression by state agents that constitute gender-based state violence. These include forced nudity and invasive body searches, gendered, age-based and homophobic stigmatisation, and the use of motherhood, caregiving roles, and threats against relatives as mechanisms of intimidation and control.

One defender told Amnesty International:

“The treatment I’ve received has been harsher because I’m a woman and a mother. They threaten me through my children, shout at me in public, and try to weaponise guilt. It’s a deliberate cruelty towards women who dare to speak up.”

“The treatment I’ve received has been harsher because I’m a woman and a mother. They threaten me through my children, shout at me in public, and try to weaponise guilt. It’s a deliberate cruelty towards women who dare to speak up.”

Another recounted how a state agent assaulted her during detention and subjected her to sexualised comments:

“The disgust I felt is indescribable.”

The report features testimonies from women such as Yenisey Taboada, mother of a political prisoner; Luz Escobar, an independent journalist; and María Matienzo, a human rights defender — all illustrating how physical, digital, and psychological harassment has become a tool to silence Cuban women.

This pattern of violence is neither isolated nor accidental; it is structural and sustained. Black women, single mothers, and women of diverse sexual orientations face heightened risks, demanding an urgent intersectional response. These abuses occur in a context of deep restrictions on human rights work, where the subordination of the judiciary to political power, the lack of reporting and redress mechanisms, and the absence of a comprehensive law against gender-based violence perpetuate impunity.

A Call for International Action

Amnesty International warns that this repression does not occur in a vacuum. The absence of strong international condemnation has allowed the Cuban state to continue its policy of control and repression with impunity.

“The international community can no longer remain silent in the face of the gendered repression suffered by women in Cuba,” Piquer stressed. “It is time for states — particularly those that have long championed human rights in Cuba, such as the inter-American bodies and the European Union and its member states — — to demand concrete protection measures. The state’s repression of women activists and defenders in Cuba constitutes a form of institutional gender-based violence that must be exposed and publicly condemned.” — to demand concrete protection measures. The state’s repression of women activists and defenders in Cuba constitutes a form of institutional gender-based violence that must be exposed and publicly condemned.”

The state’s repression of women activists and defenders in Cuba constitutes a form of institutional gender-based violence that must be exposed and publicly condemned.”

Ana Piquer, Amnesty International’s Regional Director for the Americas.

Amnesty International is demanding an immediate end to institutional gender-based violence against women defenders, journalists, and activists in Cuba — violations that manifest through harassment, arbitrary detention, and enforced disappearance, among others. The organisation is also urging the adoption of a comprehensive law on gender-based violence, including specific protections for women human rights defenders, and calling for a sustained international commitment to monitor the situation of women defenders in the country.

Launch of a Global Petition

In response to these findings, Amnesty International is today launching a global petition inviting people worldwide to urge President Miguel Díaz-Canel and the Cuban authorities to end the harassment and urgently adopt a comprehensive law on gender-based violence.

Each signature collected will amplify the voices of women defenders — strengthening international pressure and demonstrating that they are not alone.

For more information or to arrange an interview, please contact press@amnesty.org

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Responding to news that the Tunis Court of First Instance convicted human rights defenders Mustapha Djemali and Abderrazek Krimi yesterday evening, and released them due to the time already served after they have spent more than 18 months in arbitrary detention, Deputy Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa, Sara Hashash said: 

“Their release is a huge relief for families who will be celebrating being reunited with their loved ones after more than 18 months in arbitrary detention. However, it is still outrageous that Mustapha Djemali and Abderrazek Krimi have been detained and now convicted for their humanitarian work for the Tunisian Council for Refugees. These two human rights defenders and humanitarian workers have been arbitrarily detained and subjected to a bogus criminal investigation, simply for doing their jobs. Their organization was carrying out essential work assisting refugees and asylum seekers in partnership with the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and the Tunisian authorities.

These two human rights defenders and humanitarian workers have been arbitrarily detained and subjected to a bogus criminal investigation, simply for doing their jobs.

Sara Hashash, Deputy Regional Director for MENA

“Mustapha Djemali, 81, and Abderrazek Krimi, 61, should never have been investigated, let alone prosecuted. Providing shelter and assistance to people at risk is a human rights imperative. The charges against them, including ‘forming an organization’ to ‘assist the clandestine entry’ of migrants, are a misuse of anti-smuggling laws to stifle civic space. This verdict sends a chilling message to human rights defenders and organizations working in Tunisia, suggesting that they risk arrest and imprisonment for fulfilling their mandate.

“This case is a stark example of the wider crackdown by Tunisian authorities on civil society and the rights of refugees and migrants, marked by arbitrary arrests, racially discriminatory practices, and xenophobic rhetoric. The authorities must quash the conviction.

“The Tunisian government must respect its obligations under international law, including the rights to freedom of association and expression. Instead of criminalizing human rights defenders, the authorities must enable them to carry out their vital work free from any fear of reprisal, arrest or prosecution.”

Background

Mustapha Djemali and Abderrazek Krimi are respectively the founder and project manager of the Tunisian Council for Refugees (CTR), a Tunisian NGO which worked with the UNHCR and Tunisian authorities to pre-register asylum seekers and provide essential assistance to those in precarious situations. Police arrested them in Tunis on 3 and 4 May 2024.

On 24 November, the Tunis Court of First Instance sentenced them to two years in prison, while suspending the remainder of their sentence after taking into account the 18 months in pre-trial detention already served. They were released last night. The court acquitted the three other CTR staff also on trial. A fourth employee had his appealed his indictment and is not being tried yet. Tunisian authorities have increasingly escalated their crackdown on human rights defenders and independent non-governmental organizations (NGOs) through arbitrary arrests, detention, asset freezes, bank restrictions and court-ordered suspensions. 

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