Stewart M. Patrick
Of the many injustices in the contemporary world, modern slavery is among the most shocking. The trade in humans is a worldwide phenomenon. It spans the poorest and wealthiest countries and is deeply embedded in global supply chains. This is not only an ethical outrage but a threat to international security, prosperity, good governance and development. As the world seeks to “build back better” from the COVID-19 pandemic, it must tackle the scourge of human bondage.
Slavery is one of the oldest human institutions, and it remains stubbornly persistent. The global abolitionist movement, which originated in the late 18th century, eventually succeeded in outlawing formal chattel slavery by the mid-20th century—one of the signal moral advances in human history. The global prohibition against slavery is embedded in numerous international legal instruments, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, signed in 1948.
Despite these efforts, human servitude persists, although its character has changed over time. Every year, some 25 million people are trafficked globally for forced labor or sexual exploitation, generating some $150 billion in revenue for perpetrators, according to the International Labor Organization, or ILO. That makes modern slavery one of the most lucrative forms of international crime. Most victims are trafficked within their own countries, but a large proportion are transported across borders. The majority of those trafficked are women and girls.
The United Nations defines human trafficking rather cumbersomely in dry legal terms, but the horror of the modern trade in humans is better reflected by the multiple abusive situations it encompasses. They include minors trafficked for sex tourism in Brazil; Uyghurs from Xinjiang forced to produce cotton and other products for export; “sea slaves” compelled to labor on fishing vessels in Southeast Asia; and migrant farm workers in the U.S. trapped in debt bondage.
Human trafficking persists despite decades of international efforts to combat it. The first ILO convention on forced labor was negotiated in 1930—more than 90 years ago. More recently, in 2000, U.N. member states approved the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children as a supplement to the U.N. Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime. The Palermo Protocol, as it is known, requires all states to criminalize human trafficking. That same year, the U.S. Congress approved the landmark Trafficking Victims Protection Act, or TVPA, articulating a strategy to combat human slavery at home and abroad, including through new forms of foreign assistance and a yearly report assessing country performance worldwide. The TVPA has since been reauthorized five times under Democratic and Republican administrations.
“Twenty years after these standards were enacted, however, human trafficking persists.” That is the sobering judgment of a recent Council on Foreign Relations report, “Ending Human Trafficking in the Twenty-First Century,” written by two of my CFR colleagues, Jamille Bigio and Rachel B. Vogelstein, and for which I was a member of the consultative study group. Despite growing political attention to the problem, impunity reigns: According to the U.S. State Department, there were only 11,841 prosecutions for human trafficking worldwide in 2019.
Those most at risk of trafficking are the estimated 2 billion inhabitants of developing and emerging economies who work in the informal economy. The COVID-19 pandemic has made matters worse, as it could throw an additional 150 million people into extreme poverty, placing them at greater risk. Over the longer term, climate change threatens to exacerbate human precarity in many developing countries, by wiping out agricultural sectors and accelerating mass migration. Migrants are particularly vulnerable to being victims of forced labor.
As the CFR report makes clear, modern slavery is not just a violation of fundamental human rights. By entrenching criminality and reinforcing corruption, it undermines the rule of law and political stability in both source and destination countries. By suppressing the development of human potential and distorting local economies, it likewise threatens prosperity and long-term development, while giving jurisdictions that tolerate forced labor an unfair competitive advantage.
The CFR report contains dozens of recommendations for combating human slavery, many targeted at the United States. Let me focus on just four priorities for multilateral action.
First, the world needs much better data on the scale, varieties and methods of human trafficking, drawing on advanced digital technology. Artificial intelligence, machine learning and satellite imagery can assist authorities in identifying vulnerable populations and trafficking routes across the world, as well as evolving criminal strategies. Mobile communications networks can also be leveraged to protect potential victims from recruiters.
Second, governments must improve the policy coherence of anti-trafficking efforts at both the national and multilateral levels. In the U.S., for example, the departments of Justice, Labor, Homeland Security, Defense and State, as well as the U.S. Agency for International Development, all have a piece of the action, but their anti-trafficking efforts are often poorly coordinated. The same stove-piping occurs globally, with the ILO, U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, the International Organization for Migration, U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, UNICEF and the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights pursuing separate strategies. Better integration is needed across the board.
Third, the global trading system must be harnessed to combat trafficking, particularly forced labor. When U.N. member states were negotiating the creation of the World Trade Organization, developing countries insisted that labor issues remained outside of its purview and confined to the ILO. That division is increasingly unacceptable, particularly when two-thirds of contemporary trade agreements contain labor chapters. It is time to leverage the massive weight of the WTO to end worker abuse worldwide.
Fourth and most importantly, national governments and multilateral organizations must ramp up pressure on private companies to root out forced labor in their supply chains. The world has made modest progress on corporate accountability, consistent with the U.N.’s Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, agreed in 2011. Global corporations increasingly accept an obligation to exercise “due diligence” in their supply chains. The problem, as ILO Director-General Guy Ryder recently lamented, is that it is “difficult at the moment to find a uniform, broadly accepted definition of what ‘due diligence’ consists of.” Many such efforts are cursory, addressing only the last links in the supply chain, rather than delving all the way down. Equally problematic, these obligations remain voluntary. True accountability will only come with more stringent, binding regulations. In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, it is not enough to ensure that supply chains are more “resilient.” They must also be more humane.
When U.N. member states unanimously endorsed the Sustainable Development Goals in 2015, they pledged, in SDG target 8.7, to “take immediate and effective measures to eradicate forced labor, end modern slavery and human trafficking, and secure the prohibition and elimination of the worst forms of child labor….” A global partnership, Alliance 8.7, has since emerged to advance these objectives. But turning the world’s pious words into concrete actions will require focused attention from world leaders, generous resources from wealthy governments, and an end to impunity for perpetrators. Given the gravity of the scourge of slavery, no effort should be spared.
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