Symposium on Forced Labour Research, Sheffield University

8 Oct 2015

I don’t think it will be a surprise to anyone that since I was asked to speak here I’ve been thinking a lot about the number 42.

42 is, as Douglas Adams reminded us, the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything.

It is an absurd notion, but Adams was getting at an important point with his tales of Deep Thought in the Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy. He was getting at that belief in large parts of the modern world that the only things that matter are the quantifiable ones. It’s part of the discourse that poverty reduction in general, and slavery eradication in particular, are technocratic challenges which merely require the rational thought of the clever and the largesse of the rich to fix.

But, of course most of the things that matter in life, the universe and everything cannot be quantified, or are things for which numbers are merely crude metaphors. How do you quantify love? Or the experience of watching a sunrise in the Ethiopian highlands or dolphins dancing off the coast of Angola? Or the pleasure of a fine wine and cake?

Or the level of contempt that one person can have for another human being that allows them to calmly contemplate working them to death?

Non-quantifiable questions about non-rational issues, are at the heart of the practice of slavery. In particular the questions of discrimination and the dehumanisation of other people are fundamental to slavery.

It is technically true that anyone can be enslaved, particularly if they are caught up in the cataclysms of war. But that truism masks a more fundamental truth: that the weak who are subject to the prejudices of others are the ones who are vastly more at risk of enslavement: Dalits and Adavasi in South Asia; migrants in Western Europe and the Americas; women and children everywhere.

So given the topic of this roundtable, my question is: how can one obtain insight into any of these issues with quantitative methods?

Of course there is a need to quantify the scale of slavery in the world, to help plan responses and assess progress. But knowing the numbers does not allow one to understand the reasons why people are enslaved nor how their enslavement may be ended.

Anyone who has done any reading in the social sciences will be aware of the sort of profound insight that quantitative methods can provide. But it needs particularly skilled and focused researchers gifted with exceptional acuity in the framing of questions. I suspect we may be some way off a sufficiently widespread understanding of the generalities of contemporary slavery and the specifics of its national and cultural manifestations before such research practice can come into its own.

So, as a general rule I would argue that, even though quantity has its own quality, increased qualitative research is more vitally required for the understanding of the root causes of slavery and the political and social remedies to the problems.

Qualitative and historical studies have shown us that effective anti-slavery action still requires the elimination of underlying discrimination practices and empowerment of those vulnerable to slavery. It has shown us the importance of provision of high quality and appropriate education to children vulnerable to slavery. It has shown us the importance of unionisation as a means to rebalance the power between exploited workers and employers. It has shown us how combinations of governmental cynicism and ineptitude contribute to the endangering of vulnerable workers both in their home countries and when they travel in search of decent work.

That is not to say the qualitative research is a silver bullet. In spite of much qualitative research, including that conducted by the Anti-Trafficking Monitoring Group which Anti-Slavery leads, the British Conservative Government remains thoroughly convinced that the principle cause of slavery in the UK is evil organised criminal masterminds, and have proven remarkably resistant to the notions that their Overseas Domestic Worker visa, their lack of labour inspection within risky industries such as construction, and their police cuts have anything to do with the problem.

This brings me to another point. The ending of slavery is a political challenge. Or rather it is a bundle of national and international political challenges. And these political challenges bump up against the prejudices and pretensions of the privileged,, who since the days of Sparta have conspired to keep power out of the hands of the helots. Thus it is. Thus has it always been.

And, as with the British government’s notions of why there is slavery in the UK, these prejudices are deeply resistant to erosion by mere facts. Economic agency theory suggests that humans will always act to maximise their material benefit. But when Hamilton tried to establish a slavery-free economy in the US in the 1790s and when Lincoln tried compensated emancipation at the outset of his presidency, both failed to end slavery in spite of the economic benefits they promised to slave holders. The American Plantocracy were so wedded to their aristocratic privilege that their status gave them, they found it something that mere economic wealth could not compensate them for.

We see similar issues today when we carefully consider slavery across the world. In the Arabian peninsula the Kafala system provides the legal basis by which the elites can obtain economic benefit by indulging their prejudices against South Asian migrant workers by enslaving them. In South Asia the rule of law does not extend to the hundreds of millions of Dalits and Adivasi who live there and hence the powerful are able to enslave them with impunity. Different political economic models are unappealing to the elites in these situations because they would involve treating those they disdain with decency and recognition of our common humanity.

The increased complexity of the Sustainable Development Goals over the Millennium Goals, and their rooting in human rights standards hopefully will help us move on from that limited technocratic discourse.

This technocratic approach to slavery seems to me at the moment to be leading to a fixation upon a search for a menu of technical options which only require money to be plugged into in order to achieve change. Such an approach is chimeric. It can never replace the hard political work, the partnerships and community development, the research and investigations, the exposes and confrontations, the dialogue and collaborations, that is necessary to shift power into the hands of those who have been excluded from power.

In the end, I would suggest, that the visceral is as important as the rational: which side are you on? The struggle of the helots, the Dalits, the migrants, the outcasts continues. And, unless we properly understand that, irrespective of what we try to do or how we try to do it, we are fated to become part of that most accursed community in human history and society – the well-meaning.

It’s a considerable achievement that the Sustainable Development Goals now contain an explicit reference to slavery, forced and child labour.

The absence of this issue from the Millennium Development Goals was a travesty, and the consequences of that are highlighted by the number 5.5 million. 5.5 million is the ILO’s most recent estimate, made in 2012, of the number of children in slavery. It is the same as the ILO’s estimate of the number of children in slavery in 2005

In other words, in spite of all the real progress on poverty reduction and development, including a huge fall in the overall numbers of child labourers, during this period international development has completely passed by the millions of children and, for that matter, the tens of millions more adults in slavery across the world.

So the inclusion of slavery eradication in the Sustainable Development Goals is therefore highly significant. It is a recognition by the international community that it has until now comprehensively ignored some of the people in greatest poverty across the globe. But for this recognition to have practical meaning, it must be translated from a sentence in a United Nations pronouncement to a strategy that puts power into the hands of the excluded.

Because one thing that the struggle against slavery puts into the sharpest of focus is that poverty is not merely about a lack of things, but more fundamentally about a lack of power. This remains true in spite of some of the more recent philanthropic discourses on poverty which treat it not even as an economic issue but a technocratic one.

Slavery is one of the most political of development and poverty issues. Those who are enslaved are drawn from communities which are systematically excluded from power to enable their control by those who are more privileged. They include Dalits and Adivasi in South Asia, migrants in Europe, the Middle East, the Americas, South East Asia and West Africa, and children everywhere, .

Prejudice and discrimination against certain groups on arbitrary bases such as caste, ethnicity, gender and religion is still frequently used as a basis upon which the more powerful exclude the more vulnerable from the processes of development. By doing so those same mechanisms of social exclusion also render those discriminated against more vulnerable to slavery.

Development and humanitarian practitioners have barely even been aware of these dynamics and so have failed to address them. If those who call ourselves anti-slavery activists also ignore the fundamentally political nature of these challenges then we too will fail in the imperatives placed upon us by our mandates.

So this is where it gets difficult.

The majority of the underlying causes of slavery are profoundly political and fraught with contention by vested interests which are quite happy with the way the world currently is. Many new entrants to the struggle against slavery are content to see this struggle as merely a matter of locking up evil people by decent police. They are unconcerned with the altogether more contentious questions that underpin the reality of contemporary slavery, such as state-acquiescence in caste-based discrimination, the toleration of child marriage, undermining of rule of national and international law, the failure to establish safe migration routes for vulnerable workers seeking decent work, or the decriminalised international trade in slavery produced goods and services.

For example if the international community is serious in its efforts against slavery how can we continue to acquiesce in the ready access to international markets and warm inclusion to the international polity of Uzbekistan and Qatar, to name but two states, which, with differing degrees of cynicism, have effectively legalised slavery in within their borders.

Or, in spite of its recent casting of itself as a global leader against slavery it is unlikely that the UK has for a moment considered the potential impact that its naked disdain for the European Court of Human Rights will have on the rule of international law in general and as it relates to slavery in particular: that court has been vital since 2000 in forcing governments across Europe, including the UK, to properly respect the rights of victims of slavery. Any credible international struggle against slavery must therefore confront the British government on this, one of their most cherished political prejudices.

And, another political issue: should India be made a permanent member of the UN Security Council while its toleration of caste-based violence is so high, and its efforts to end slavery are so paltry?

So to advance Target 8.7 requires a new concentration of effort that draws in not only traditional ILO partners but also the entire development and humanitarian sector on this issue, recognising that tackling slavery is a fundamental political and development issue and one that is not solely the preserve of law enforcement professionals. Frequently, such as in the brick kilns and quarries of South Asia, it is openly practiced. Therefore there should be a requirement of every credible development and humanitarian agency to consider if they could contribute towards the reduction of slavery and child labour within every community with which they work. This may not always be possible. But asking the question, and considering carefully the dynamics of power and discrimination could lead to empowerment of some who would previously have been overlooked.

Second, there should be much more conscious focus by in development and humanitarian programmes on diminishing the vulnerability to slavery of those communities. For example, ensuring that the children, particularly the daughters, of brick kiln workers and manual scavengers in South Asia have access to proper education, could help break the transmission of slavery across generations. And ensuring that the curriculum promotes human rights, in particular those of girls, and toleration for all would help erode the prejudices that permit human beings to enslave and exploit others.

Aid programmes must work to advance the rule of law by building the capacity of the courts and law enforcement agencies, so that anti-slavery laws can be upheld rather than regarded as mere suggestions to the elites who continue to be able to exploit people with impunity.

Beyond the development and humanitarian sectors the issue of slavery must become a centrepiece of diplomacy, trade and migration policy. In particular there is a need for a clear recognition of the brutal reality that tied visas are de facto licences for trafficking across the world.

This Alliance is vital if we are to obtain progress on Target 8.7. But to do so we must tackle this issue directly, holding each other to account and not merely tinker at the edges with approaches which never confront many of the most powerful who maintain the systems of slavery.

 I spent five years during the Angolan Civil War working with colleagues to keep a quarter of a million war displaced people alive across the central highlands of that country.

Our work had no impact whatsoever on the underlying causes of those people’s displacement. The cause was the war which arose from a complex mix of a legacy of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, Cold War geo-politics, regional rivalries, and local personalities, not least the extraordinary psychosis of Jonas Savimbi, the leader of the Angolan rebels. But while we could never have claimed to have contributed to bringing peace what we did ensured that more people survived the violence into its messy and corrupt aftermath in one of Africa’s most beautiful countries.

This is true for every war-related humanitarian emergency. The refugee crisis in the Mediterranean arises from similarly complex causes including the geo-politics of oil, a stupid and illegal invasion of Iraq, regional rivalries between Shia and Sunni, and the bitter lunacy of the DAESH partisans.

The resolution of this violence may take decades. Those involved in humanitarian response will merely try to stanch the bleeding, literally and figuratively, until some settlement can be reached which will end the civilian population displacements.

That is the truth of it in my experience: that effective responses to humanitarian crises must have immediate, medium and long term aspects addressing both the symptoms and causes of the crisis. It is also something that David Cameron should understand from the UK’s engagement with diverse emergency responses during his premiership.

And yet his statement on the 2 Sept did not put me in mind of a statesman wrestling with the complexities of a multi-national humanitarian disaster. Rather I was reminded of an observation, I think by Milan Kundera, that novelists tell the truth with lies and politicians tell lies with the truth. Cameron’s glib comment that, “I don’t think there is an answer that can be achieved simply by taking more and more refugees,” struck me as a stark example of Kundera’s insight.

Of course taking in refugees would no more solve the crisis in the Mediterranean than digging latrines in the displaced camps of Angola brought peace to that country. Giving refuge to desperate human beings has never and could never solve any underlying problem that has caused any war that has forced any population displacement anywhere in the world. That is not its purpose.

The purpose of giving asylum is to preserve people’s lives until the protracted process of ending war can be achieved and some measure of security established to allow civilians to return home. That should be something we understand as Europeans with our collective memory of the convulsions of the Second World War. Without such basic humanitarian measures the death toll of war and humanitarian crises would be much higher.

That is something that David Cameron should also know from that historical perspective as well as the humanitarian one. If he does not know this by now he should not be Prime Minister.

The proximity of the bloodshed of the Mediterranean to Europe imposes different responsibilities on the nations of Europe that are unlike our responsibilities in crises in other parts of the world. No amount of disingeniuity on the part of David Cameron or his fellow travellers changes that. The immediate challenges of this crisis require establishment of safe migration routes into Europe, a fair sharing of the responsibility for resettlement of refugees across the nations of Europe, and, as Germany has already done, suspension of the Dublin Agreement.

If Cameron and the UK government do not face up to the immediate term necessities of this refugee crisis then he may continue to congratulate himself on his clever manipulation of the facts and smooth media obfuscations. But history will be much more clear sighted. Its verdict, on his failure of moral courage at this moment of truth, will be damning.

Help free Raif Badawi

UK Ambassador to Saudi Arabia
British Embassy, PO Box 94351
11693
Riyadh
Saudi Arabia

Dear Ambassador,

Welcome to your new role and congratulations on your appointment.

I am sure you are aware of the case of Raif Badawi who was sentenced in Saudi Arabia to 10 years and 1,000 lashes for running an online forum. Amnesty International believes Raif is a Prisoner of Conscience. He has done nothing criminal, yet he is facing this barbaric punishment simply for exercising his right to freedom of expression.

Over 100,000 people in the UK have signed Amnesty International’s petition calling on the Saudi Arabian authorities to stop the lashing of Raif Badawi and release him immediately.

I urge the UK Government to use its influence and raise concerns with the Saudi Arabian authorities about Raif Badawi’s situation.

I call on you specifically to:

• Prioritise Raif’s case in all meetings with the Saudi Authorities

• Meet with the minister responsible in the Saudi Arabian government and request permission to visit Raif in prison.

I look forward to your response.

Yours sincerely,

Aidan McQuade

Emailed to ukemb@mofa.gov.sa

Your Excellency

Raif Badawi

I am writing to express my dismay at the protracted torture and imprisonment of Raif Badawi by the Royal Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

At a time when the world has been appalled by the massacres in Paris the world sees that violence echoed by the Saudi state in its treatment of Raif Badawi.

That Raif Badawi is being tortured and imprisoned by the Saudi state in such a brutal and medieval fashion for attempting to exercise free speech shocks the world. Further it undermines the Royal Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s claims as a bulwark against “Islamic State”, as the world begins to see little distinction between the violence of the two.

The immediate ending of Raif Badawi’s flogging and his release back to his family will begin to repair some of the damage that has been done to the international reputation of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

I respectfully request that you convey to your government this request, in the name of human rights, for the ending of the torture of Raif Badawi and his release.

Yours faithfully

Dr Aidan McQuade

Tonight we are marking the end of our 175th year in existence. I don’t want to spend this evening telling you of boring stories of our glory days, but rather to reflect for a moment, not so much on what we have achieved over these years as why it has been achieved.

Last time I was in the outstanding museum of slavery in Liverpool I saw a poster there: it said remember not that we were enslaved, but that we fought.

That remains the truth today as it did in the past. From the brick kilns of northern India, to the agricultural fields of west Africa and North America, to the servants quarters of every major city of Europe, ordinary people are struggling for decent work, for dignity, for freedom for themselves and their families.

Change when it comes arises from that insistence from ordinary women and men that the powerful cannot ultimately ignore.

It was the courage and belief of a disparate coalition people of conscience and courage across the globe from the Quakers and the trades unions in Britain who founded Anti-Slavery International, to the Maroons, and Sam Sharpe and Toussaint in the Americas that forced the British Government to end first the slave trade and then abolish slavery itself in the British Empire.

That same dynamic was something that Lincoln recognised when he saw that the action and sacrifice of, among others, the black troops of the Union army would not let him reconstitute a slave-holding union.
It’s something that this British government recognised when people of conscience and courage in businesses, trades unions and civil society, many who are here this evening, put their names to a demand to the British Government for more robust anti-slavery action on supply chains.

Much work remains to be done to ensure that the modern slavery bill going through the UK parliament is truly world leading, providing proper statutory protections for victims of forced labour, and ending the de facto legalisation of trafficking for domestic servitude.

Yet more work is required internationally to ensure that slavery eradication is recognised as fundamental to poverty reduction and advancing human development, and to ensure that those who are struggling for freedom across the globe are offered solidarity and meaningful support and not merely warm words and empty sentiment.

Martin King once said that the moral arc of the universe ultimately bends towards justice. It does because human beings twist it in that direction. Everyone here tonight, through numberless acts of courage and belief have been writing the anti-slavery history of our times. Let’s keep going for as long as that takes until finally, we have overcome.

Speech to conference “Common Action to Fight Trafficking in Human Beings”, organized by COMECE (Commission of Catholic Bishops’ Conferences of the European Community), along with BEPA (Bureau of European Policy Advisors) European Commission, and CEC (Conference of European Churches)
27 Nov 2014, Brussels

I took the title of this presentation from a poem by Seamus Heaney, about the consequences of bigotry and prejudice. And of course Heaney’s phrase echoes one in the Book of Exodus “I have been a stranger in a strange land”.

That is apposite because the first denunciation of trafficking in Western Christianity came from a migrant and former slave, St Patrick , echoing a more visceral strain of European anti-slavery demonstrated by Spartacus and Crixus in their desperate struggles for freedom. It is also apposite because the contemporary exodus of poor migrants in search of decent work can, too often end with their enslavement rather than their liberation. Because contemporary slavery is another consequence of bigotry and prejudice.

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.

Now there are a number of important lessons from this case

The first key lesson, I think, is that in order to properly identify survivors of forced labour and to detect trafficking it is important that those charged with upholding the law actually 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 and international, law.

But in being ignorant of the law they are not alone. This ignorance is widespread even amongst many who should know better. I’ve been at more than one meeting, some of them organised by the Churches, which have had keynote speakers seriously asking “Is trafficking slavery?” and failing to come to any convincing conclusion after half an hour’s deliberation.

The struggle against slavery is one of the oldest human rights struggles in the world, so if someone is new to this field, as some important actors are, it is important to remember that we do not have to reinvent the wheel. This path has been trodden by giants before us and we are building on the work that they have done. Indeed without proper consideration of the learning of anti-slavery activists from history and from the world beyond Europe and, indeed, beyond Christendom, there are considerable risks that efforts towards ending trafficking will result in little more than well meaning slogans.
it is vital to note that this question of, “What is slavery?” is not a matter for social scientific contention of the sort so beloved by academics. It is something that has been established in international law as a result of considerable effort over the past 100 years to provide a robust framework for the continuing struggle against slavery.

Part of the reason for the breadth of law in the international conventions is that contemporary slavery reflects a diversity of human experience: a life lived in bonded labour in Indian brick kilns is different in important respects from that of a Nepalese domestic worker in Lebanon, or somebody in chattel slavery in West Africa, or a “restavek” child slave in Haiti, or a forced labourer in European agriculture. This can complicate identification. It also means that the responses to these diverse manifestations of slavery must be nuanced and adjusted to the realities of those particular abuses in the time and circumstances in which they occur.

But in spite of the advances of national, European and international law on forced labour over the past few years there clearly is not yet a general law enforcement culture across Europe and the rest of the world that appreciates adequately the nature of forced labour and trafficking in a way that they would for other crimes of violence. So there there needs to be greater professional police and other criminal justice training to understand their diverse roles and responsibilities towards this crime. And there will remain a need for specialist units to support local efforts and to help lead and develop police and criminal justice policy and practice through example.

A second important matter that this case illustrates is that while there are a diversity of manifestations of slavery there are underlying all such cases, three common factors: individual vulnerability, social exclusion, and failure in rule of law. Slavery emerges at the conjunction of these three factors.

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.

The issue of social exclusion and discrimination is a fundamental one in slavery: when we look at historical slavery in the Americas we see that racism was both a cause and a consequence of that slavery. This remains the case today. In Latin America today many in forced labour are indigenous people. In South Asia most people in slavery are Dalits or from other scheduled castes or minority groups. And in Europe most people in slavery are migrant workers.

This is important for a variety of reasons. Most immediately it hinders the identification of survivors to trafficking and slavery.

It is wholly without credibility to presume that any individuals charged with identification of survivors of trafficking are 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.

Indeed this point is emphasised when one considers the broader figures relating to identification of survivors of trafficking in the UK. There, if a person from the European Union presents themselves to the authorities as a potential survivor of trafficking then there is a greater than 80% chance they will be recognised as such. If they come from outside the European Union then there is less than a 20% chance they will be recognised as such. That sort of imbalance in decision making can only be the result of institutionalised discrimination, something fed by the media and political elites who should instead be sanctioning those who disgrace their offices by privileging their petty bigotries over their responsibilities under the law.

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.

But often political leaders themselves privilege their prejudices and exclude the groups they dislike from the basic protection of rule of law.

In India, for example, a system of caste-based apartheid excludes Dalits and other minority groups from the effective protection of rule of law. Indeed even Pope John Paul II noted that within the Catholic Church in India discrimination against Dalits was rife and a matter that the Church had failed to respond adequately to. Such acquiescence in discrimination allows almost 300 million Indian citizens to be enslaved by more powerful members of society in a range of industries from brick kilns to garment manufacture.

This benefits us too. Probably each one of us in this room is wearing at least one garment tainted by being manufactured using slavery.

Just to give one illustration of what that means in human terms: in the course of a piece of research into trafficking in garment manufacture in India Anti-Slavery spoke to the mother of one young 20 year old woman who worked in a cotton spinning mill there. She described visiting her daughter:

“I spoke to her in a room provided for visitors”, she said, “because visitors are not allowed to go inside the mill or hostel. My daughter told me that she was suffering with fever and vomiting often. …I met with the manager and requested him to give leave to my daughter because she was unwell. I told him that I would send my daughter back once she was better. But the manager refused saying that there was a shortage of workers therefore they cannot grant leave. He also assured me that they would take care of my daughter and asked me not to worry.”

A week later she received a call to say now she could collect her daughter. She was dead.

Now when we present evidence of forced labour in their supply chains to businesses their defence tends to be “But we audit our supply chains!” Such ethical auditing has been going on for years now. Its reasonable to come to some assessment of its effectiveness. And one of the things that is completely clear is that it has been wholly ineffectual in identification and protection of vulnerable workers, and wholly inadequate in bringing about any reform in the systems of production where forced labour and trafficking are so rife.

That should not be news to anyone because the purpose of “ethical auditing” is to find nothing. And should some diligent journalist or non-governmental organisation ever expose the sort of exploitation that is routine for the supply of cheap garments to our high streets, there is no consequence for those businesses or the business executives who have made the decisions to source from slavery. Their goods are not excluded from European markets. The executives are not held criminally liable.

In Qatar and across the Gulf there has recently been attention paid to the systematic use of forced labour of tens of thousands of migrant South Asia labourers in the preparation of the infrastructure for the 2022 World Cup. This forced labour is underpinned by what is called the “kafalah” system. This is a so-called sponsorship system that ties workers to their employers to such an extent that even in the most abusive employment relationships, up to and including forced labour, the workers cannot change jobs or even go home.

It is a cynical system to facilitate medieval levels of exploitation up to and including slavery.
It is also essentially the same system that the United Kingdom government has in place for migrant domestic workers, which de facto legalises trafficking for forced domestic servitude.

Here again the issue of discrimination comes into play in facilitating slavery. By refusing to recognise the realities and risks to migrant domestic workers lives because of the simple fact that they are migrants the powerful in society refuse to recognise, to identify, their enslavement and hence singularly fail to protect them.

Now I don’t know what the Churches are saying privately to the UK government about this, but publicly some church leaders are acting as little more than cheer-leaders for the British Government’s hype that it is becoming a world leader in the struggle against slavery. Frankly the only people who would see what the British government is doing is world leading are those who know nothing about what world leading action dealing with the fundamentals of contemporary slavery actually looks like.

When we consider cases such as these it is clear while organised crime is an important element in contemporary slavery it is in a considerable minority. The vast majority of slavery in the world today is disorganised, perpetrated by ordinary people provided with the considerable opportunity for exploitation and indulging of their prejudices and racism by the failures in rule of law across the world.

This case of Polish workers in the UK illustrates another important point and that is the value 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.
Tom Bingham, one of the outstanding British jurists of the past 50 years argued that human rights, including, of course, an absolute prohibition on slavery, must be at the heart of any credible system of rule of law.

But, as we have seen, sometimes societies and nations refuse to apply these basic protections to particular social groups.

Political leaders are able to get away with this because the prejudice against the enslaved and their communities prevent slavery from becoming a political issue: if slavery is being inflicted upon groups and individuals who the wider society simply does not like, then that wider community is more likely to tolerate the abuses if they see them and not raise their voice to demand that governments do their jobs to stop the problem.

This strikes at the very principles which Europe is meant to represent: equality before the law, rule of law and human rights.

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.
Within our own common European homeland it requires a repudiation of the causes, in particular anti-migrant bigotry, as well as its consequences.

Countries which are establishing their competitive advantage in whole or in part based on their toleration or facilitation of forced labour should not be granted unimpeded access to European markets.
Business executives who knowingly use forced labour in their supply chains should be held criminally liable and Europe should advocate for and implement extraterritorial law on this matter.

When we discuss the issue of identification and protection of victims of trafficking we normally think of law enforcement being responsible for this. As I have alluded business also has such responsibilities, moving away from the discredited systems of auditing towards more effective ones of investigation. Aid agencies also have responsibilities for identification and protection. The European Commission, Caritas, Christian Aid, Oxfam and others work across the world in countries where slavery is prevalent and were options for decent work for socially discriminated against groups are limited. So slavery eradication should be mainstreamed into all European funded development and humanitarian projects. This can start relatively simply by asking of each project what is it doing to address the issues of slavery and ensure that those who are vulnerable to discrimination and social exclusion are incorporated into the programmes. The answer “nothing” may be reasonable – some projects will legitimately have other priorities. But introducing this question to development and humanitarian response would at least engage the scores of professionals working in these sectors and harness some of their energies and abilities toward the purpose of ending slavery.

Europe should assert that the eradication of slavery and child labour should be made stand alone post-2015 sustainable development goals and should act as if it is so in the development of its aid strategy.

One critical area with which Europe could make a vital contribution through aid and diplomacy is on strengthening rule of law, in particular anti-slavery law, in states like India, which have decent law but fail to protect its citizens because of inadequacy of labour inspections, corruption in police, insufficient judicial capacity and engrained caste-based apartheid. Given that so many of India’s Christians come from the Dalit and scheduled castes the Christian churches should at least have a selfish interest in ensuring that the rights of our co-religionists, as all human beings deserve, are robustly asserted.

Harry Truman once said “Its amazing what can be achieved when you are not bothered who gets the credit!” Indeed that is because, as Bobby Kennedy pointed out it is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that the history of our times are written.

Slavery is a human institution but like all human institutions it can be changed by human action. So the immediate challenge is: how do we, professionally, as individual citizens and collectively, use our power to fashion a political economy that repudiates slavery in all its forms and all its evolutions. That is a challenge which has no easy answer and which requires a dynamic process in response.

But while we don’t know how this struggle will end we do know how it should begin.

Jesus said “I bring not peace but the sword”. Europe and Christianity should pick up that sword now, and stand alongside the other Christians, Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus, non-believers who have been labouring for decades in isolation to challenge those vested interests who maintain, for their own selfish ends, the political economic systems that enslave people the world over.

Forced domestic servitude in the UK