Anti-Trafficking Review
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Debate: Use of the Term ‘Bonded Labour’ is a Must in the Context of India
No full textThere is no question that we should distinguish between forced labour, trafficking and slavery. But, we should also include in the debate another concept, ‘bonded labour,’ as it describes a distinct and widespread form of forced labour in India that does not fully accord with the International Labour Organization’s (ILO) definition of forced labour. The sociopolitical reality in India and bonded labour’s intimate link with the Indian caste system demand that the term ‘bonded labour’ be retained in the discourse on forced labour and trafficking in persons. Addressing bonded labour enables two interconnected areas of exploitation and discrimination to be addressed, namely working towards emancipation of the minority Dalit community and of the Moolnivasi indigenous communities
Protocol at the Crossroads: Rethinking anti-trafficking law from an Indian labour law perspective
Get PDFAs we approach the fifteenth anniversary of the United Nations Trafficking Protocol, we can discern several phases of its diffusion, materialisation and interpretation in domestic criminal law regimes across the world. Although not exclusively preoccupied with sex work and sex trafficking anymore, the fact remains that the inordinate attention on trafficking in Western industrialised economies is disproportionate to the extent of the problem. Only 7% of the world’s 20.9 million forced labourers are in developed economies while 56% are in Asia Pacific. Yet in BRIC countries like India, with a substantial majority of the world’s trafficked victims and where 90% of all trafficking is domestic, trafficking has gained policy resonance only relatively recently. Even as India remains an active site for sexual humanitarianism with international and local abolitionist groups actively targeting sex workers, the article argues that less developed countries like India can play a crucial role in reorienting international anti-trafficking law and policy. Towards that goal, this article offers India’s bonded, contract and migrant labour laws as a robust labour law model against trafficking in contrast to the criminal justice model propagated by the Trafficking Protocol worldwide
Debate: When it Comes to Modern Slavery, do Definitions Matter?
No full textOn the 3rd of April 2015, Indonesian government officials visited the remote island village of Benjina.[1] This followed press reports by Associated Press (AP) that Burmese men were being kept on Benjina island in cages, beaten with stingray tails and paid little or nothing, to fish for a company that occupies the port on the island, Pusaka Benjina Resources.[1] R McDowell and M Mason, ‘AP Investigation Prompts Emergency Rescue of 300 Plus Slaves’, AP, 3 April 2015, retrieved 23 July 2015, http://bigstory.ap.org/article/197048ef871f4b56b4a129d0e3c0f129/fishermen-rush-be-rescued-amid-indonesian-slavery-prob
Policy and Practice: The Role of Trade Unions in Reducing Migrant Workers’ Vulnerability to Forced Labour and Human Trafficking in the Greater Mekong Subregion
No full textThis paper provides an analysis of what trade unions can offer to reduce the vulnerability of migrant workers to forced labour and human trafficking in the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) and Malaysia as a key destination for GMS migrant workers. The exploration of the potential for the engagement of trade union partners is a timely contribution to the forced labour and anti-trafficking debate, given the shift towards a more holistic labour rights approach, and the ensuing search for more actors and partnerships to combat these crimes, which led to adoption of the Protocol of 2014 to the Forced Labour Convention, 1930, (Forced Labour Protocol) in June 2014. Examples from Malaysia and Thailand highlight the role that trade unions can play in policy development and service provision, and also some of the challenges associated with unionisation of a vulnerable, temporary, and often repressed, migrant workforce.
Trafficking in Persons for Ransom and the Need to Expand the Interpretation of Article 3 of the UN Trafficking Protocol
Get PDFAs the nature of trafficking in persons continues to manifest itself in myriad ways all over the world, interpretation of the UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children (Trafficking Protocol), should be broadened to include newly emerging practices that are similar in nature to those it has already embraced under its definition. The Protocol appears to encompass other forms of trafficking which are unnamed or unforeseen by the definition provided under Article 3. It is time to expand its spectrum. Northeast Africa is plagued by a unique form of trafficking in persons—trafficking in persons for ransom. This involves a practice where people are smuggled, abducted, kidnapped and tortured to compel their relatives and families to pay ransom money. Victims are nationals of Eritrea, Ethiopia, Sudan and South Sudan. However, as Northeast Africa hosts particularly high numbers of Eritrean migrants and the largest Eritrean diaspora globally, Eritreans are very vulnerable to being targeted for trafficking for ransom. As trafficking for ransom is an emerging trend, legal ramifications have never been studied in full. Few reports try to address legal issues around the phenomenon, and those that do only give it a few paragraphs of attention. There is need for a closer look at this form of trafficking
Deploying Disclosure Laws to Eliminate Forced Labour: Supply chain transparency efforts of Brazil and the United States of America
Get PDFStates are increasingly addressing forced labour in supply chains by implementing transparency or disclosure measures that aim to make companies disclose the existence of forced labour in their supply chains. Examining the recent approaches of Brazil and the United States of America shows some promising practices to best inform governmental policy going forward
Vulnerability to Forced Labour and Trafficking: The case of Romanian women in the agricultural sector in Sicily
Get PDFThis paper focuses on labour and sexual exploitation faced by Romanian female workers employed in the agricultural sector in Ragusa, Sicily, Italy. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in 2013 and 2014 with Romanian female farm workers in Ragusa, the paper identifies factors that contribute towards their vulnerability to exploitation. By paying specific attention to the experiences of women who are mothers with dependent children, we look at structural factors that increase their vulnerability and consider how this vulnerability ‘forces’ women into situations whereby they effectively accept and/or submit to abuse. We also highlight how European Union (EU) citizenship does not automatically protect migrants from such abuse. This is important because, as we argue, the mistreatment experienced by participants in this study can be regarded as cases of forced labour and trafficking, based on International Labour Organization (ILO) indicators[1] and the definition of trafficking provided by the Directive 2011/36/EU. For a long time, these cases have mostly been neglected by incompetent authorities or addressed using only repressive and assistentialist approaches. Thus, this paper also investigates the limits and potentialities of the Italian legal framework on trafficking, and the ways local institutions and organisations confront the rights violations occurring in the agricultural sector. We contend that in order to effectively counter these phenomena, labour rights measures and anti-trafficking interventions have to be combined based on a comprehensive approach aimed not only at assisting victims, but also at tackling the structural factors that create their vulnerability.[1] ILO, ‘ILO Indicators of Forced Labour’, International Labour Office, 2012, retrieved 11 August 2015, http://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---ed_norm/---declaration/documents/publication/wcms_203832.pd
Editorial: Looking Back, Looking Forward: The UN Trafficking Protocol at fifteen
No full textAnniversaries provide a pretext for reflection—celebration for national independence days, mourning for war-time massacres. For political reforms and legal innovations, anniversaries warrant a different set of reflections: less predictable or uniform, more sober stock taking and weighing of achievements and failures than affirmation of unequivocal success or defeat. This fourth special issue of the Anti-Trafficking Review embraces the occasion of the fifteenth anniversary of the 2000 United Nations (UN) Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children (hereafter Trafficking Protocol), and evaluates the impact of this landmark instrument of international law on the grave social, political and economic problems it targets. Among the many and varied constituencies concerned with issues of trafficking, from government bodies to international advocacy groups to sex worker collectives, the Trafficking Protocol has attracted considerable attention. It has been widely ratified, its definition of trafficking has been extensively invoked, its criminalisation mandates have been aggressively followed, its victim protection measures have been enthusiastically cited
Purity, Victimhood and Agency: Fifteen years of the UN Trafficking Protocol
Get PDFWhen the women’s movement reverted back to the nineteenth-century Victorian concept of ‘trafficking in women’ to address abuses of migrant women in the sex industry, it unwittingly adopted not only a highly morally biased concept—dividing women into innocent victims in need of rescue and guilty ones who can be abused with impunity—but also one with racist and nationalistic overtones. Despite efforts to counter these flaws, this inheritance continues to define the debate on trafficking today, exemplified by the distinction made by the United Nations Trafficking Protocol between so-called ‘sexual exploitation’ and ‘labour exploitation’ and its focus on the aspects of recruitment and movement. As a result, its implementation in the last fifteen years has led to a range of oppressive measures against sex workers and migrants in the name of combating trafficking. The focus on the purity and victimhood of women, coupled with the protection of national borders, not only impedes any serious effort to address the exploitation of human beings under forced labour and slavery-like conditions, but actually causes harm. The call of the anti-trafficking movement for a human rights-based approach does not necessarily solve these fundamental problems, as it tends to restrict itself to protecting the rights of trafficked persons, while neglecting or even denying the human rights of sex workers and migrants
Debate - Achievements of the Trafficking Protocol: Perspectives from the former UN Special Rapporteur on Trafficking in Persons
No full textThe United Nations (UN) Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children, Supplementing the UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, 2000 (Trafficking Protocol), is a watershed in galvanising the global movement against human trafficking. Thanks to the Protocol, international and regional bodies, along with civil society groups, have become involved in researching the issue and supporting anti-trafficking efforts; and states have begun to introduce new laws and policies aimed at criminalising trafficking, protecting victims and preventing future trafficking.[1][1] J N Ezeilo, ‘First decade of the mandate of the Special Rapporteur on trafficking in persons, especially women and children’, A/HRC/26/37, UN, 2014