The Clean Clothes Campaign (CCC) has called for dropping lawsuits against worker groups and protesters and also exhorted global fashion brands to stand up for them in Bangladesh.
The global rights groups claimed in a statement on Wednesday that one year is on since a violent crackdown by state actors and employers against Bangladeshi garment workers protesting for higher wages.
Nearly 40,000 workers are facing risk of arrest due to repressive legal charges against them in the form of blank arrest warrants.
Campaigners, labour rights advocates and trade union representatives also launched an international campaign on the day, condemning the inaction of fashion brands and demanding withdrawal of 36 cases against worker groups and protesters.
Anne Bienias, a lead campaigner for the CCC, called on the brands to take swift action, saying, "Brands such as H&M and Zara have responsibility to ensure that complaints against unnamed protesters cannot be used to intimidate workers and their representatives."
"The refusal of brands to support union-backed wage demands despite extreme poverty and their lack of willingness to get these cases dropped is illustrative of who profits from the status quo and who doesn't. Brands clearly do."
The statement also reads that the CCC has linked 45 fashion brands to suppliers who filed 36 cases against garment workers in Bangladesh and have been pushing these brands to ensure the cases are dropped for the past year.
While some brands have taken initial steps to ensure suppliers drop false allegations, a year on, all brands and suppliers have failed to follow through and not a single case has been cleared, it noted.
The CCC is launching a new action tracker exposing which brands are linked to the outstanding warrants, including H&M, Zara, Next, Matalan, Levi's, Bestseller and more.
Campaigners hope this tool will shed light on the complicity of the industry and ensure brands follow through with suppliers to ensure charges are fully dropped.
The launch of this new effort to apply pressure on brands comes on the anniversary of last year's widespread wage protests in Bangladesh, it said claiming police and the military cracked down on protesting workers who showed dissatisfaction over the disappointing outcome of the long-awaited minimum wage negotiations.
As a result of the violent police response against protesters, four workers lost their lives, hundreds were severely injured and 131 arrested.
The 36 largely 'baseless criminal cases' are held against 40,000 'unnamed individuals', the CCC said, adding labour representatives are warning these blank arrest warrants could be used against any workers who raise concerns with factory bosses, or as a tool for settling personal or political grievances.
The statement quoted Kalpona Akter, president of the Bangladesh Garment and Industrial Workers Federation, as saying: "In an industry where union repression is rife, getting the cases dropped is just a first but very necessary step on the way to an industry in which workers can live a decent life off their wages and in which barriers to freedom of association are taken down. We won't live in fear. We are calling for living wages that support our families."
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