Let me start first with a concept, and let me apologise if for some of this is, as we would say in Ireland, stating the bleeding obvious.

Empirical research by Anti-Slavery International and others shows that slavery emerges at the conjunction of three factors individual vulnerability, social exclusion and failure in rule of law.

In Europe those who end up in forced labour tend to be poor women and men who are generally subject to wider social prejudice because of their migratory status, ethnicity, sexuality or indeed because of their particular personal vulnerabilities in the case of substance dependant or mentally challenged individuals.

This reality strikes at the very principles of equality before the law and of rule of law itself in this community of nations.

Let me try to illustrate this with a case that we encountered recently: A group of Polish construction workers came to a police station in England to complain about not being paid and about their working conditions. They did not speak much English and were swiftly turned away as the police deemed this not to be their matter. Another group of Polish workers who worked for the same construction project complained to another police station and were met with the same response.

The workers then decided to ask their families back in Poland for the money to return home.

Upon their return home, they complained to the Polish authorities about their treatment in the UK and about the inaction of the UK authorities. The Polish authorities took the matter up with the UK embassy.

Eventually, following the complaints from the Polish authorities, the UK police investigated the case and ended up prosecuting the recruiter that trafficked the Polish workers in the UK for labour trafficking.

Now there are a number of important lessons from this case:

First this case illustrates the importance of governments acting on behalf of their migrant citizens. It was the intervention of the Polish government here that compelled the British authorities to action. I would argue that there is a universality to this lesson. The remittances of migrant workers across the world are vital for poverty reduction and human development in their home countries. The contribution that migrant workers are making to the countries of their birth indicts their home governments failures to fulfil their international responsibilities towards their citizens. Aside from the moral and legal responsibilities of governments towards their citizens their failure to do more to protect migrants is short-sighted economically as it could help them obtain decent work and hence higher remittances.

This is as true for Asia and Africa as it is for Europe. And, looking a bit beyond our own European borders it would be an important European initiative against trafficking and towards poverty reduction if we were to support financially and professionally the establishment of a more comprehensive system of labour attaches for those migrants who we are seeing most exploited in the countries where there is most exploitation.

Across the Gulf migrant workers speak with envy of their Filipino colleagues whose government attaches some importance to this sort of support for their migrant citizens. That government’s position and that of the migrant workers of other countries would be strengthened if more governments were to act in this way. Perhaps European support to such measures could stem somewhat the bloodshed of vulnerable workers unleashed by FIFA’s decision to award the 2022 World Cup to Qatar.

The second key lesson from this case is that failure in rule of law often begins when those charged with upholding the law do not know what the law is and what their responsibilities under the law are. If the police in this case had bothered to pick up a phone to obtain a translator and to explore the accounts of the workers against the indicators of forced labour they would have found that they were being presented with an enormous opportunity to deal with something that is explicitly recognised as a major crime in British, let alone European, law.

In spite of the advances of national and European law on forced labour over the past few years there clearly is not yet a general police culture in the UK that appreciates adequately the nature of forced labour and trafficking in a way that they would for other crimes of violence. I suspect this is true for much of Europe and it is certainly true for most of the rest of the world. While there needs to be greater professional police and other criminal justice training to understand their diverse roles and responsibilities towards this crime there is still, particularly in this era of public spending cuts, a need for specialist units to support local efforts and to help lead and develop police and criminal justice policy and practice through example.

However, going back to what I said at the start of these remarks, on the centrality of social exclusion in the sustaining of forced labour in any society. It is wholly without credibility to presume that any police force is going to be immune from the prejudices of the wider society from which they are drawn and to whose elite they report. It is not fanciful to suggest that the police who encountered these Polish workers may have regarded them with some disdain and some may even have felt that their responsibilities towards foreigners in exploitative employment were lesser than those towards locally born citizens.

It is beholden upon leaders across Europe and the world to take active steps to eradicate these sort of prejudices, sanctioning public officials who disgrace their offices by pandering to their bigotries rather than upholding rule of law.This is a matter that goes right to the top: as Roger Plant mentioned earlier today the UK is currently making great claims that it is going to establish a world leading law against slavery. But the same department that is promulgating this law maintains a system for migrant domestic workers that facilitates their enslavement using identically the same principles as the Gulf’s Kafalah system that facilitates the enslavement of migrant workers there. The British Government has refuse all entreaties to change this because it is terrified of being seen as “soft of migrants”.

Chomsky argues that propaganda is to democracies as violence is to dictatorships: the means by which governments control their populations. But perhaps matters have evolved somewhat. Perhaps in parts of Europe the propaganda of parts of the agenda setting media is usurping the authority of elected officials and controlling their choices and actions. In the UK for example it appears that the enslavement of migrant domestic workers is more tolerable to the British Government than upsetting the Daily Mail newspaper.

To counter this I would not argue for restrictions on media freedom, but rather for the adoption of moral courage by political leaders: a key front in the struggle against trafficking in Europe must be the explicit rejection of the pernicious anti-migrant rhetoric which some powerful elites in the media and politics seek to perpetuate.

Slavery is a crime but its effective eradication requires more than a narrow criminal justice approach. It requires a rethinking of aid, trade and diplomacy as well as criminal justice. And within our own common European homeland it requires a repudiation of the causes, in particular anti-migrant bigotry, as well as its consequences.

Speech to 2014 Annual General Meeting of Dalit Solidarity Network

I started my professional career as a water engineer and spent years in Ethiopia, Eritrea, Afghanistan and Angola focused on how water and sanitation interventions could help reduce poverty or mitigate the consequence of war.

There are millions of people alive today across the world because of the work of water and sanitation engineers and this work remains a vital, under-resourced and often under-appreciated strategy in long term poverty reduction and humanitarian response.

Badaun sisters’ rape-murders: ‘They could have been saved if police acted’, says family

But it’s not a panacea. And I was appalled last week to read an article on the BBC website, which presented seriously the idea that a new latrines programme in the Indian village of the two young girls found hanged in a tree in May, after they had gone to defecate in the open, was a sufficient response to their rape and murder.

The founder of the charity that put the new latrines into the village declared that “I believe no woman must lose her life just because she has to go out to defecate”, echoing Prime Minister Modi’s Independence Day speech on 15 August when he vowed to end open defecation.

“We are in the 21st Century and yet there is still no dignity for women as they have to go out in the open to defecate and they have to wait for darkness to fall,” he said. “Can you imagine the number of problems they have to face because of this?” he asked.

Open defecation was a problem in Angola, Ethiopia and Afghanistan when I worked there but while poor sanitation is a constraint particularly on girls education and renders millions of women vulnerable to all forms of sexual harassment and assault, it does not inevitably lead to an epidemic of rape and lynchings. Other factors are necessary for that to occur.

Anybody brought up with the Rockford Files knows that all crimes, particularly murders, have three fundamental elements: motive, means and opportunity. But starting with an article in the Guardian by the director of Wateraid shortly after these atrocities there has been a tendency amongst some leaders to substitute the motive for these rape-murders with the opportunity for them.

I would like to discuss why this has been happening because I feel it touches upon an important and troubling issue.

The American business theorist Chris Argyris identified the issue of “undiscussability” as a key factor in reducing the capacity of organizations and businesses to perform effectively. Organizations, he found, were unable to discuss risky or threatening issues especially if these issues question the underlying assumptions and policies of the organization.

That idea applies to states and communities as well as organizations. And so responses to the deaths of these two girls have avoided perhaps the most undiscussable issue in human history: that of the intrinsic violence of caste-based apartheid.

Arundhati Roy points out in The Doctor and the Saint that, “Poverty … is not just a question of having no money or no possessions, Poverty is about having no power”.  Caste-based apartheid maintains that exclusion from power of hundreds of millions of citizens in a way that is vitally important politically and economically for powerful elements of society’s elites.

It is increasingly clear for example that the maintenance of this social system provides competitive advantage to South Asia, particularly India, in the globalising political economy. Caste-based apartheid underpins the “camp coolie” and “Sumangali” systems allowing the powerful to enslave with impunity vulnerable workers, often young Dalit women and girls, and hence to derive considerable profits from their enslavement. Each of us in this room is also benefiting from that enslavement as it allows, amongst other things, the provision of cheap clothes to our high streets and so, each of us is probably clad in at least one garment that has been produced in some part through the labour of enslaved people.

Making the issue of caste-based apartheid undiscussable insulates it politically and allows the elite greater security in their feudal level of aristocratic privilege: how can something become a political issue if one cannot even give voice to the question?

So I suppose I should not be shocked that a response to the rape-murder of two young Dalits is a sanitation programme. It comes from the same philosophical tradition as a compulsory education law to address child labour or a rural employment guarantee scheme to respond to bonded adult labour.

Each of these programmes hopes to treat a serious symptom of poverty, and indeed they do hold potential to do so. But they scrupulously avoid mentioning the cause of the problems. That is because the cause of the problems is caste-based apartheid and the child labour and slavery that this facilitates and there are too many vested interests who benefit from that for it to be a politically safe topic of conversation.

The failure to engage with the undiscussable issue of caste in South Asian society is a failure in the most basic principles of good development practice. There has been over the past decade a growing discourse of development as a technocratic project. That is an idea that poverty reduction is principally about the transfer of things to people who do not have things. Bill Gates has been a particularly powerful advocate of this approach and we see it reflected in, for example, Fairtrade’s fixation on prices paid to producers as the holy grail of poverty alleviation, to the exclusion of almost all other development issues.

But effective democratic development is not primarily a technocratic, or even an economic, challenge. It is a political one. Democratic community development should be about empowerment of vulnerable and at risk people. Sometimes the constraints on empowerment are material things. But much more often they are social systems which aim to exclude certain people from inclusion in society and in poverty reduction measures, and if these are unaddressed by development processes then the development project itself is constructed on foundations of sand. Dr Ambedkar’s words in relation to just revolution also pertain to just development: “What is required is a profound and thorough conviction of the justice, necessity and importance of political and social rights”.

But the challenge of caste-based apartheid and its undiscussability shows something more profound. Development is also a philosophical project: it is about finding the cause of injustice and calling it by its true name. Without this the system retains its power to warp and undermine even the most well-meaning efforts towards justice.

When I was thinking about what I was going to say here Seamus Heaney’s words from his poem “Whatever you say, say nothing” kept coming back to me:

O land of password, handgrip, wink and nod,

Of open minds as open as a trap,

The outside world does not well understand the South Asian codes for caste discrimination allowing the perpetrators greater leeway to continue with what they are doing guarded by silence, and by this incomprehension, from criticism by the international community. And the enforced silence around caste-based apartheid now extends as far as the UK with this British government’s pusillanimous acquiescence to Brahminist lobbying by refusing fundamental protections of British law to British citizens who happen to be Dalits.

And so the trap of caste-based apartheid that has ensnared millions of people across the world still grips, and its grip threatens fundamentally the democracy of those states that tolerate it, not least the world’s largest democracy.

Heaney went on to describe the explosive potential that injustice stoked in oppressed communities. That explosive potential must also exist in contemporary India and the rest of South Asia so long as the violence of caste-based apartheid is unaddressed. There remains time to prevent conflagration by acting with justice.  As Ambedkar pointed out “Law and order are the medicine of the body politic and when the body politic gets sick medicine must be administered“. Specifically  effective rule of law across South Asia must be extended by expansion of the judiciary, rooting out of corruption in the police, criminalisation of caste discrimination and making sure that laws like the Indian rural employment guarantee scheme and compulsory education act are fully and effectively implemented.

But time is running out. And if the rest of us remain silent on this issue of caste-based apartheid then we will also have to accept some measure of responsibility next time we hear of other crucified Dalits hanging from trees.

I would like to thank this Conference for the opportunity to speak on behalf of Anti-Slavery International and the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women.

Everyone here is aware of the ILO estimates of a minimum of 21 million children and adults in forced labour and that the profits from this exploitation are estimated to be $150 billion per annum.

That is a dreadful indictment of how we conduct our business today.
We are no longer living in a 1930’s world. Today the expansion of globalisation means that the international law governing the contemporary realities of trade has become vital. Hence this Conference is the essential forum where the dark side of these new realities must be confronted, not with fine words and voluntary approaches, but with robust international law.

Unless robust action is taken to extend the rule of international law against forced labour the routine enslavement of marginalised workers will continue to be at worst facilitated and at best tolerated in the global political economy.

So, as the UN Special Rapporteurs on Slavery, Trafficking and Migration have recognised, a binding Protocol is required to ensure coherent international action. This is necessary to prevent a minority of unscrupulous businesses and corrupt political elites from systematically using forced labour to derive competitive advantage over the vast majority of honourable business executives and politicians who are striving against all odds to make a better world for their employees and their citizens.

We therefore appeal to this Conference to seek a binding Protocol with a strong Recommendation to the Convention that will require states to ensure law and practice that effectively identifies and protects victims of forced labour, giving special consideration to the particular risks faced by migrants, women and children and to ensure that the perpetrators of forced labour compensate their victims; that require states ensure their courts and law enforcement have sufficient capacity to ensure effective rule of law against forced labour so that states create a level playing field for ethical business, declaring also their expectations of business action to eradicate forced labour from their supply chains and how businesses should disclose their efforts towards these ends; that requires states and employers to promote freedom of association and collective bargaining for all workers; and that encourages states to incorporate into their aid, trade and diplomacy measures to reduce the risk of forced labour.

I am sure that everyone in this room is abhorred by the idea of forced labour and slavery. However that is not enough. This Conference has the power to do something directly about its realities. It is the duty of everyone here to demonstrate that they are as opposed to the idea of slavery in practice as they are in principle. That means a binding protocol and strong recommendation are necessary. If this Conference fails in that task then the judgement of history and of conscience will be harsh.

The meaning of the term “political economy” has changed somewhat through history and today its meaning is still somewhat contentious. But being something of a moral philosopher by academic interest I was somewhat surprised to learn that the concept of political economy originated in moral philosophy. The term was originally used “for studying production and trade, and their relations with law, custom, and government, as well as with the distribution of national income and wealth.”

With the evolution of political economy into economics we seem to have established a dominant morality for our contemporary age cut free from the Aristotlean and Judaeo-Christian archetypes of earlier years. Perhaps this new dominant Western morality is most infamously encapsulated by Milton Friedman with his assertion that the only moral responsibility of business executives was to maximise profits for shareholders within the law.

This new morality becomes increasingly problematic because the loss of the term “political” from the term is not just a terminological shift, or a philosophical one that places the sphere of economics in the realm of quantitative science rather than in that much more slippery and realistically human sphere of moral philosophy. It also reflects another important political reality: many politicians now seem to believe that their responsibility in regulating business is restricted to asking business how it wishes to be regulated.

You can see this borne out if you look at the chapter on supply chains in the recent report in the UK of the Joint Committee of the Lords and Commons on the “modern slavery bill”: some people, myself included, argued to the committee that a law on forced labour in supply chains should be modelled on the UK Bribery Act making individual business executives legally accountable for forced labour in their supply chains. This idea was dismissed out of hand. Others argued for, perhaps a lower standard, a law modelled on the Californian Transparency in Supply Chains Act. There was a parade of evidence from business opposing this. What was acceptable to business was a slight modification of the Companies Act to require them to mention slavery in their annual reports. This of course became the committee’s recommendation.

The practice of business and trade substantially divorced from politics would be problematic if we were still living in an 18th or 19th Century political economy where most businesses were more confined and defined by national borders. In the contemporary globalising economy it is particularly devastating for millions of vulnerable workers, particularly those in poor and corrupt countries where rule of law is slight or where the law is cynically manipulated by the powerful to allow the exploitation of the vulnerable. In this contemporary globalised political economy those who do much of the production of goods and services are separated by great distances from those who commission the production and from those who consume. The scale of these distances means that it is now considerably easier to ignore the death or suffering of those workers than in the past when they were being produced in the same city or country as the consumers and bosses.

The expansion of globalisation means that the international law governing this new approach to doing business becomes increasingly vital. Unfortunately, as Tom Bingham notes in his book Rule of Law, international law has never been the most robust area of law, and that is probably putting the matter very mildly where international business is concerned: Indeed the question of how trans-national business can be held to legal account is a matter that Bingham, one of the most distinguished British jurists of the past 50 years, never even considered in his otherwise exceptionally fine book.

These risks are compounded because, to use a legal metaphor, there is a prima facie case, I believe, that a number of businesses, countries and regions of the world are basing their competitive advantage on the use of forced labour in their supply chains. Anti-Slavery investigations in India have shown how the routinised used of the forced labour of girls and young women is now a central feature of garment production for northern hemisphere markets. Further investigations in Thailand have shown how forced labour is a significant feature of production for export markets, most notoriously perhaps in the fisheries that supply prawns to our supermarket shelves.

In both these countries the failure of international rule of law is compounded by a failure of national rule of law. For Dalits in India, for Lao, Burmese and Cambodian migrants in Thailand, the notion of equal protection before the law would be a laughable notion if the consequences of its absence were not so tragic. In India the the courts are so overworked that it would take hundreds of years to clear the back log of cases in Delhi alone meaning that factories that use forced labour of vulnerable workers, such as those producing cotton garments in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, can act with virtual impunity. In Thailand, police describe migrant workers as walking ATMs, people to be harassed and extorted from not to be protected.

Countries such as India and Thailand are, however considerably more advanced in terms of rule of law than those such as United Arab Emirates and the Gulf states which have fashioned the law, most glaringly with their use of the kafalah system, in order to facilitate the forced labour of vulnerable migrant workers. The 2022 World Cup is already being prepared using the forced labour of thousands of south Asian migrants to Qatar. Again the western companies who trade with and profit from this forced labour system and, most craven of all, FIFA who facilitated one of the greatest forced labour opportunities since the end of the Cold War, are able to do so with impunity.

The kafalah system, which is also practiced in the UK in relation to domestic workers, is only the most glaring example of how national and international law ratchets up the risks for migrant workers seeking decent work by failing to provide sufficient opportunities for safe migration. There is an hypocrisy at the core of this attitude to migration: on one hand governments will decry contemporary slavery and praise those migrant workers whose remittances are often more important contributions to their countries development than international aid. On the other hand those same governments will refuse, lest they upset business interests to back measures in international law that have some prospect of making the world a little safer for them to seek decent work in.

So, if we are considering the contemporary political economy, how human beings arrange their law, custom and government to facilitate production and trade it is clear that large portions of the political economy are crafted to facilitate the exploitation and enslavement of vulnerable workers and that the economic and geographic separation between those who craft they system and the screams of those who serve it allows complacency to build the inertia that allows for the lack of change.

I went to see Chiwetel Ejiofor as Lumumba in A Season in the Congo a few months ago. There is one notorious scene in that play where back in Europe the Western business interests are shown in conference discussing how much they had to give up in Congo without affecting their principle interests. How to ensure not so much that the new boss becomes the old boss, so much as how to ensure that the old bosses remain the bosses under a facade of some form of change.

I think we see a lot of that still with some of the recent political posturing regarding contemporary slavery. In the UK there is a strong emphasis in the “modern slavery bill” on a criminal justice response to slavery, and a refusal to contemplate a migrants’ rights perspective on the issue, a perspective that might contribute more usefully to the majority of people enslaved by disorganised crime as well as the minority in the hands of organised crime.

I don’t wish to be too churlish about the US and UK military/intelligence responses to the kidnapping of Nigerian schoolgirls, because I believe such a response is necessary, but there are already hundreds of thousands of child slaves in Nigeria, carried off and raped in ones and twos rather than hundreds, under the thinest of veils of respectability that is provided by forced child marriage and the fifth wife form of enslavement. We still await a systematic response for these numberless, nameless victims of slavery across Nigeria and the rest of West Africa. A minimum that should include a commitment to obtaining universal children’s education in the region on a curriculum that has a strong emphasis on girls’ and women’s rights.

Most people who have the power to shape law, government or custom in a fashion that would undermine aspects of slavery are against slavery in principle. Few of them are, however against slavery in practice. When they do engage with the issue they do so in a manner that is reminiscent of the political economy of the old Soviet Union, statist, inflexible and oblivious to the functioning of the market economy, when one of the things we do know about slavery is that it is highly entrepreneurial and constantly evolving: an exemplar of unfettered capitalism in fact. Now a lesson we should have learned from the Cold War is that when a statist bureaucracy confronts a free market system the free market approach will triumph. And that is what is happening at the moment.

What I believe we need is a much more social democratic approach to this challenge: one that recognises the human face of the problem and ceases to treat the economic and business aspects as somehow sacrosanct or inevitable. This implies a strong emphasis on regulation of international business, putting forced labour abuses on the same legal basis as bribery is currently treated in the UK, empowerment of those vulnerable to slavery and a co-option of the diverse institutions of society from aid agencies to the courts into the struggle. Slavery eradication must be put at the heart of anti-poverty efforts; the authority and capacity of national and international courts must be extended to allow them to effectively hold to account businesses that may otherwise transgress the basic ideals of the universal declaration of human rights. This should also imply increased attention to safe migration and a holding to account of those states that tolerate slavery within their borders.

There’s a lot of folk at the moment want to be the new Wilberforce, the shinning hero who delivers a great leap in moral progress. I don’t have a lot of time for that. Harry Truman once said “Its amazing what can be achieved when you are not bothered who gets the credit!” Indeed that is because, as the song says, it is “we” who “will overcome” not me.

So that is an immediate question: how do we, professionally, as citizens and collectively fashion a political economy that repudiates slavery in all its forms and all its evolutions – and to hell with who gets the credit for that.

First of all many thanks for the opportunity to speak here.

We are meeting here, as everyone is aware, as the ILO are engaged in a process of standard setting in relation to ILO 29, the 1930 forced labour convention. This is an important process because, as many of the interventions here have indicated, forced labour has moved on considerably since that convention was first drafted.

It is also appropriate that we meet here at the European Economic and Social Council because, as Mrs Myria Vassiliadou, the EU Anti-Trafficking Coordinator, remarks indicated there is much that that this process can and should learn from the EU, and most particularly from the EU anti-trafficking directive, on the struggle against forced labour.

I would like in particular to highlight the strong emphasis in the Directive on the reduction of “demand that fosters all forms of exploitation” and the Directive encouragement to Member States to enact “measures to reduce the risk of people becoming victims of trafficking in human beings.”

In contemporary Europe the “legal persons”, to use the language of the Directive, most responsible for the demand for trafficked people are some of our transnational businesses.

For example as we speak today European clothes retailers are transacting deals with clothing manufacturers in southern India where the use of the forced labour of girls and young women is routinized. Indeed many of these enslaved young women will be spinning into thread cotton that has been gathered by forced labour and child slavery in Uzbekistan while, for all intents and purposes, the EU stands idly by while these abuses go on on our doorstep. Ongoing research by Anti-Slavery also finds that forced labour of vulnerable migrants in SE Asia is a huge and systematic feature of the export orientated industries of Thailand many of which find lucrative markets in Europe perhaps most notoriously the fisheries that keep us supplied with prawns.

If history shows us one thing it is that voluntary measures are woefully inadequate as a means to address systemic problems. The most popular voluntary measure of the moment is that of social or ethical auditing. Frankly we should recognise that this approach has not brought any notable change to labour rights abuses in supply chains. Rather it is used as a fig leaf by companies to indicate social concern without involving any of those companies in the necessary scale of appropriate social and political action to end the problems. Indeed in many instances the purpose of ethical auditing is to find nothing: repeatedly we see the failings of ethical auditing exposed in Bangladesh by lethal fires which have previously been given clean bills of ethical health.

Hence a binding Protocol to ILO 29 is essential. The EU directive is an excellent example of an effort to obtain pan-European systematic response. Yet as Mrs Vassiliadou’s remarks indicated also the implementation of the Directive by member states still leaves much to be desired – I would highlight in particular the failures of member states to introduce extraterritorial measures to hold to account their “legal persons”, their businesses, who recklessly endanger vulnerable workers to forced labour in their supply chains.

One of the reasons for the failure of member states to fully implement the EU directive is because of the fragmentary nature of the government of many member states: for example in the UK it is the Home Office which has primacy on the EU directive, but some of the measures that the Directive advocates do not fall within the remit of that ministry, but rather should be undertaken by the aid and trade ministries.

Replication of key measures from the EU Directive in a binding Protocol to the forced labour convention, particularly those related to the supply chains of “legal persons”, would help address this question of fragmentation by requiring other currently negligent ministries to pay attention to their obligations in the struggle against forced labour internationally. It would also promote good practice more internationally, which is also in Europe’s interest by extending rule of international law to prevent other regions of the world from deriving unfair competitive advantage from the enslavement of vulnerable workers.

Forced labour and the trafficking of human beings requires an international response. Too many countries, including member states of the EU, feel that their domestic law will provide sufficient response to the challenges of forced labour. Such an attitude shows little more than a profound lack of understanding of the realities of forced labour and trafficking in a globalising political economy. But this complacent attitude is prevalent in many government ministries across Europe and it must be challenged.

The EU Directive rightly emphasises the gendered aspects of human trafficking. There are additional factors that render people vulnerable to trafficking for different forms of enslavement. These include prejudice against caste, ethnicity or age, vulnerability through poverty, relative physical weakness or limited access to education, failures in the rule of law as a result of limited resources, corruption or both, and failure of governments to protect and support their citizens at home or abroad.

In citing this list I do not want to make the struggle to prevent human trafficking sound as if it is an unwinnable one. Each one of these problems was created by human beings and like all human constructions they can be changed by human action.

Simply put we can begin to address the challenge of preventing human trafficking by aligning justice policy with aid, trade and diplomacy. Currently national policies across Europe and the rest of the world march to their own tunes with little consideration of how they may contribute to the reduction of trafficking.

Trade policy is a particularly important example of this. As I mentioned the cotton harvest of our trading partner Uzbekistan is routinely gathered through forced labour and child slavery. This is a dreadful indictment of EU trade policy. Increased challenges from Europe as a whole and from Member States on the sufficiency of the law and policy of trading partners in protecting their own citizens from forced labour abuses should also be an important component of trade diplomacy.

Aid policy is also an area where there is surprisingly little consideration on how to reduce the supply of vulnerable workers to traffickers. Increased focus of aid policies on communities vulnerable to forced labour and trafficking would, quite simply, reduce trafficking. For example increased attention on education, including business and vocational education, for low-caste, “Dalit”, girls in South Asia would remove considerable risks of trafficking from their lives. Increasingly our private and governmental aid agencies should be asked to consider how their work contributes to the prevention of trafficking: There needs to be a wider engagement by these organisations with developing solutions to these problems if there is ever to be an optimal response by human society to this human rights abuse.

As an aside I feel strongly that there will never be a solution to poverty until there is an end to slavery and so this should be made an explicit Development Goal.

I hope all of you here will recognise that that none of the tripartite parties responsibilities end at the borders of national territory. Businesses have responsibilities in their global supply chains. Unions also have interests, for example in ensuring decent work in those same supply chains. And governments responsibilities for their citizens do not end at national borders.

So I hope you will support the idea that a new binding instrument should recognise the realities that many of the risks of forced labour in the contemporary world emerge from the gaps in national practice and international rule of law in the globalising economy.  If a new instrument can provide clear direction on how to respond to these risks, for example in the ways I have just described, then it will be well worth the effort.