Elena Urlaeva
Elena Urlaeva (born 1957) is an Uzbek human rights activist and the president of the Human Rights Alliance of Uzbekistan. She documents forced labor in Uzbekistan’s cotton industry. Her work helped spark an international campaign that led several global brands to boycott Uzbek cotton.
Urlaeva has faced repeated arrests and mistreatment. She was arrested on May 31, 2015, in Chinaz; reporters say police and doctors sedated her and performed a body search. In May 2016 she was kept for more than a month in a psychiatric facility in Tashkent. On March 1, 2017 she was arrested again, beaten by police, and held in a psychiatric facility under forced medical treatment. She had released a video describing her situation days before she was to speak to leaders of the World Bank, the ILO, and the ITUC. She was released after 23 days.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 06:35 (CET).