Ansvarsfördelning i handelskedjan - exemplet ansvar för barns rättigheter : från Uzbekistans bomullsindustri till H&M

Sammanfattning: In the Uzbek cotton industry run by the state under the country’s president Islam Karimov, children as young as the age of 7 have been forced to work under awful conditions picking cotton to fulfill stately quotas for years. In 2007 it was discovered that clothes sold by the multinational Swedish company H&M partly contained cotton from the Uzbek cotton industry. From an assumption that a violating industry cannot continue its violations without other actors supporting it by buying products directly or indirectly from the industry, the overall aim of this paper is to answer the question of which actor in the supply chain from the Uzbek cotton industry to H&M is responsible for violations of the Uzbek children’s rights. This is examined through identifying which role state responsibility vs. corporate responsibility has in the international community. My conclusion is that the Uzbekistan state as the violator is direct responsible for violations of children’s rights, the actors within the second and third stage of the supply change being indirect responsible based on the idea of CSR, and the actors beyond this being indirect responsible on different levels depending on the company’s size and distance from the source material.