Child labour

Hundreds of thousands of children across Turkey are working in agriculture, with the latest official figure from five years ago citing the number at 400,000. Experts say the real figure is much higher when Syrian refugee children are included.

There are almost 400,000 seasonal child agricultural laborers across Turkey, the Turkish Statistical Institute (TÜİK) stated in 2012. 

Even though April 23 National Sovereignty and Children's Day is still the only children's holiday in the world, it is not the same holiday of my childhood. 

Children's Day, which was first celebrated in 1927, had the aim of making orphaned and poor children of the war era happy in a festive atmosphere. Unfortunately, after so much time, we are far from making children happy. 

Shall we start with the report from the Confederation of Progressive Trade Unions of Turkey (DİSK) titled "Being a Child Laborer in Turkey," on the occasion of April 23 National Sovereignty and Children's Day? 

Turkey's Labor and Social Security Ministry has dubbed 2018 as the year "to fight child labor" and prepared an action plan that includes several key measures, from tighter controls in child labor intensive sectors to closer examination to schools' student attendance records, in a bid to achieve this goal. 

Apple has announced that it will temporarily suspend buying hand-mined cobalt in the Democratic Republic of Congo, less than a week after the publication of a Sky News investigation chronicling brutal “slave conditions” and child labor in cobalt mines there. Cobalt is one of the most precious minerals in the world for the tech industry.

Many world famous clothing companies have their goods produced by textile houses in Turkey. Brands tell suppliers: "Produce this amount of that product." Suppliers distribute the order to the contracting firms they work with. 

Daily Hürriyet reporter Burak Coşan has documented child laborers between the ages of 10 and 14 who work for 12 hours a day at unregistered textile workshops in Istanbul's Küçükpazar neighborhood. 

Around 100,000 children are in the registered labor force in Turkey, Labor and Social Security Minister Mehmet Müezzinoğlu has stated in response to a parliamentary question filed by main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) deputy Atila Sertel. 

School has started for close to 18 million children in Turkey, but upward of a million of their peers are currently engaged in child labor, according to a number of new reports.  

Turkey has sent a "Peace Ball" gift pack to Afghan boy Murtaza Ahmadi, after a photo of him wearing a replica shirt of Barcelona footballer Lionel Messi made from a plastic bag went viral.