Category Archives: Human rights and development

Learning from History and the Present: citizens and the struggle to end slavery

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Keynote speech to the 15th Annual UNESCO Chair & Institute of Comparative Human Rights International Conference, University of Connecticut

I was asked to speak a little about the broad overview of contemporary slavery and provide some historical background on the struggle So I will try to do that.

I think an important place to start relates to the question of what do we mean by slavery. I am frequently dismayed at meetings of both academics and activists when some pose questions such as “What is modern slavery?” or “Is trafficking slavery?”

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.

So what is contemporary slavery? When we in Anti-Slavery International talk about “slavery” we use that word as an overarching term for the human rights abuses defined in international law, principally by the 1926 Slavery Convention, by the 1930 Forced Labour Convention, the 1956 Supplementary Convention on Slavery, the 2000 Palermo Protocol on trafficking, and the 2014 Forced Labour Protocol.

A good working definition of contemporary slavery comes from the 1930 Forced Labour Convention, which defines forced labour as all work or service extracted under menace of penalty, for little or no pay, for which the person in question has not offered themselves voluntarily. Trafficking is the technical process of moving people into situations of forced labour – so trafficking is indeed, by definition, slavery.

Lincoln sought a legal basis to end slavery in the United States

Lincoln sought a legal basis to end slavery in the United States

There are other important international laws related to this field, in particular on child labour and decent work, and there are important nuances within the slavery conventions I mentioned. But 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. Remember how Lincoln had to struggle for a legal basis to end slavery in the United States. It is important to realise that we do not have to go back to that situation.

An Indian brick kiln

An Indian brick kiln

Part of the reason for this 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 American agriculture. Hence the responses to these problems must be nuanced and adjusted to the realities of those particular abuses in the time which they occur. The 2014 Forced Labour Protocol was adopted in recognition that the realities of forced labour have changed since the original Convention was adopted in 1930, and there will doubtless be other areas where there is a need for further extension and development of the international law, for example around the issue of child marriage.

But in spite of the spectrum of experiences of contemporary and historical slavery empirical studies conducted by Anti-Slavery International and others indicate that slavery emerges at the conjunction of three common factors: individual vulnerability, usually, but not exclusively as a result of poverty; social exclusion; and failure of rule of law.

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.

Thus has it been, thus will it always be.

In Latin America today many in forced labour are indigenous people. In Western Europe most people in slavery are migrant workers. In South Asia most people in slavery are Dalits or from other scheduled castes or minority groups.

This is important for a variety of reasons, not least that it inhibits the issue from becoming a political one: 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.

And slavery is very much a failure of governments’ most fundamental responsibility: establishing rule of law. 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 in a recent study we conducted of child labourers enslaved in the garment workshops of Delhi they told us how, despite plenty of good Indian law against slavery and child labour, when the workshop owners fail to pay bribes to the police, the police come, arrest the children and hold them hostage, stopping work, until the bribes are paid. In other parts of India Dalits enslaved in brick kilns or agricultural labour find it next to impossible to obtain legal remedy for the situations in which they find themselves.

In other parts of the world rule of law is much more explicitly undermined. In Qatar there is 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 this system that underpins the trafficking for forced labour of thousands of South Asian labourers for work on the infrastructure and venues for the soccer world cup in Qatar 2022.

Kafalah is a cynical system to facilitate medieval levels of exploitation up to and including slavery across the Gulf states.

It is also essentially the same system that the United Kingdom government has in place for migrant domestic workers. The UK system for domestic workers’ visas de facto legalises trafficking for forced domestic servitude. It does this by explicitly saying to migrant domestic workers that if they leave the employment of the person to whom their visa is tied, no matter how abusive that employer may be, they will be deported. That places in the hands of unscrupulous employers an enormously powerful threat to hold over the head of any vulnerable worker hoping to improve their own life and that of their family through hard work.

The refusal to apply basic protections of rule of law to some within a society is sometimes deliberate in order to obtain some aristocratic privilege over a group of people, such as was the case with the 19th Century US system of slavery, even when free labour and emancipation were more attractive economically. This remains the case with India’s caste-based apartheid today.

Sometimes the failure to provide basic rule of law protections are as a result of a mistake or oversight. Sometimes, as we are presently seeing with the British Government, it is as a result of ineptitude born of ignorance, ideology and xenophobia. In the UK, for example, 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.

In the 21st century the issue of government response to slavery becomes much more vital as the political economy becomes increasingly globalised. With globalisation the capacity of states to regulate business, as envisioned by classical economics is increasingly limited because too few states recognise that this responsibility now requires extraterritorial legislation to ensure the legal accountability of trans-national corporations, and of individual business executives who are running those corporations. Such legislation is also a central requirement in the struggle against contemporary slavery, particularly as businesses extend their operations into countries with limited rule of law and high levels of corruption.

The history of the struggle against slavery, as with the rest of the struggle for human rights, and the rest of history, is sometimes a messy and fraught affair, filled with petty rivalries, personal jealousies and self-serving accounts. And because, given the nature of slavery, its history is quite a personal story. People are not enslaved by poverty or drugs or some impersonal force: human beings do this to other human beings.

The diversity of personal perspectives means that there is inevitably a diversity of historical narratives. This is accentuated in the history of the struggle against slavery by the fact that there is a plurality of historical slavery experiences just as there are a plurality of contemporary experiences: from the trans-Atlantic slave trade and that of the Americas, to the trafficking from East Africa to Asia, to the indigenous forms of slavery and slavery-like practices, such as serfdom, that were present in Europe and the rest of the world.

Thomas Clarkson

Thomas Clarkson

Memory can be a self-serving thing as can the official versions of history. So surveying the history of this struggle can be confusing. Alongside the immense, and immensely troubling, accounts of the experiences of people in slavery, there are also propagandistic accounts of the benefits of slavery for enslaved people. And, just considering the anti-slavery struggle, there were also inevitable clashes between the leading anti-slavery figures. This resulted in such unedifying spectacles as the efforts by the sons of William Wilberforce to try to write the monumental figures of Clarkson and Equiano out of history, or the efforts of Salmon Chase to organise a coup d’etat against Lincoln. Some historian’s even discern a dispute between Spartacus and Crixis at the height of the Gladiator War.

But, nevertheless, history and society critically interrogated can be a source of understanding and learning.

The former French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau was once asked if anything could ever be said with certainty about the First World War given all the vast and bloody confusion that entailed. Yes, he said. “No one can ever say Belgium invaded Germany.”

Such hard facts may be rare enough in history, and indeed in any aspect of life, but it is important to try to find them because from them we can discern what worked, what didn’t work and why.

And, at least as importantly, the process of thinking critically about history, and of refusing to accept unthinkingly the propaganda of the powerful or the official versions of the winners, of considering carefully life and society, can provide a basis for developing our own citizenship and our capacity for action for justice.

I think there are a number of hard truths that than can be discerned from contemplation of the historical and contemporary struggles against slavery.

The first thing that emerges for me from consideration of the diversity of contemporary anti-slavery struggles is that there is not a single anti-slavery movement.

The memorial to Shaw and the 54th

The memorial to Shaw and the 54th

I was at the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool a while ago and I saw a poster there commemorating the struggle against slavery and the transatlantic slave trade: it said “Remember not that we were enslaved, but that we fought“. It’s a truth stunningly emphasised in the memorial to Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts 54th on Boston Common.

And it remains the case today. However the activists who risk life and limb to end contemporary slavery across the globe know that few today beyond their own directly affected communities are remotely interested in trying to end these modern forms of slavery.

Unlike previous struggles against aspects of slavery or more recent struggles to end, for example, apartheid in South Africa, or to advance the peace process in the North of Ireland, the contemporary efforts of indigenous campaigners against slavery are very poorly supported by international efforts.

There is very limited discussion on how policy on migration, international aid, trade, or diplomacy should be shaped to support local anti-slavery activists. There is little discussion on how to reshape the international political economy away from one where unscrupulous political and business leaders are allowed to develop competitive advantage through their facilitation of, or use of, forced labour and slavery. The international silence is deafening on caste discrimination in South Asia, which imposes a system of apartheid on over 300 million people. This system not only undermines the very concepts of rule of law and democracy in South Asia but also provides the social exclusion vital to establish a population who can be enslaved with impunity.

This provides huge benefits to powerful vested interests across South Asia. But we in the Northern hemisphere also benefit. Slavery provides us cheap shrimp for the dinner plates of Europe and North America. So extensive still is the use of the forced labour of girls and young women in garment manufacture in southern India, not to mention the forced labour, including forced child labour, in cotton production in Uzbekistan and other parts of central Asia, that the probability is that every one of us in this room is wearing at least one garment that is tainted with contemporary slavery.

Just to give one illustration of what that means in human terms: In the course of a piece of research Anti-Slavery International, funded by Humanity United, conducted into the forced labour of girls and young women in the garment sector of the state of Tamil Nadu in Southern India we spoke to the mother of one young woman, 20 years old, about the same age as many of you, who worked in a cotton spinning mill there. She described visiting her daughter:

Barbed wire around the compound of a South Indian spinning mill

Barbed wire around the compound of a South Indian spinning mill

“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: a life over before it had barely been allowed to begin.

Just as enslaved people were worked to death on the plantations of the US South in the 19th Century so too are they today worked to death in the garment factories of Southern India, the fishing boats of Thailand, on the World Cup building sites of Qatar and the rest of the Gulf, in agricultural fields from West Africa to North America, and in the servants quarters of every major city of the world.

Thus has it always been.

A further point that emerges from consideration of historical and contemporary slavery is that there is no silver bullet to end slavery.

I think this is one of the key lessons of the history of the anti-slavery movement. When Anti-Slavery International’s antecedents in the Committee for the Abolition of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade was established in 1787 they believed that the ending of the slave trade would inevitably lead to the ending of slavery. It was certainly an important milestone but additional effort was necessary until chattel slavery was abolished in the British Empire. But even then slavery transmuted into different forms: bonded labour was still tolerated in British India and now in independent India and Pakistan. Indentured labour became a feature of British colonialism post-1839.

In the United States there was a similar approach to the eradication of slavery. Some believed that confining of slavery to the US South would ultimately lead to it naturally dying out there. But in the end a devastating war was necessary. And again slavery transmuted first into exploitation and then into a variety of new forms affecting vulnerable workers in the unpoliced parts of the economy.

In the present day in spite of slavery being illegal in most countries of the world there are a minimum of 21 million people in slavery and forced labour. Whatever magic bullets have been fired at the problem they have failed to stop it.

Instead we need to conceive of a much broader based approach to dealing with contemporary slavery: complex problems generally require sophisticated solutions. This is the case with slavery. It is a crime, but it needs more than a criminal justice approach to counteract. As I mentioned earlier the anti-slavery struggle, if it is to be successful, must become a centrepiece of diplomacy, and policy and practice related to migration, international aid and trade.

Such an approach must include a comprehensive programme of human, civil and economic rights for those most discriminated against and most vulnerable to slavery. This would offer a chance of peace and prosperity for them, their families and their countries rather than the continued violence of forced labour and poverty that describes their present, not to mention the risks to their futures.

The beginning of such a programme should be marked by a clear declaration by the United Nations that the eradication of slavery and child labour should be made stand-alone post-2015 sustainable development goals. This would help focus the minds of the thousands of anti-poverty and humanitarian professionals on considering how their particular expertise and professional responsibilities may contribute to the elimination of slavery. For those of you who take practical action against slavery perhaps consider writing to your president and to the Secretary General of the United Nations with this demand.

Leading on from this the struggle to end slavery should be a central feature of governmental aid programmes such as those of USAID and the other major multilateral and bilateral agencies across the world. This means establishing specific anti-slavery budget lines for countries and regions with the greatest prevalence of slavery, and mainstreaming consideration of slavery into other anti-poverty and humanitarian work. Without such consideration there is a significant risk that anti-poverty interventions either relatively or absolutely exacerbate the position of the most vulnerable groups in those communities.

For example in 2005 our colleagues in the Niger anti-slavery organisation TImidria identified that slaves were being used in some of the food for work programmes which had been set up in response to the West African famine of the time. The way this worked was that slave masters would send those they had enslaved to toil all day on the programmes and on their return they would confiscate the ration cards they had been given in payment for their work.

Now I don’t want to be glib about this. I worked in humanitarian response for many years and appreciate deeply what a difficult and vital role it is. Without exposure to the institutions of contemporary slavery I am sure I would have made a similar mistake, and indeed probably did in other parts of the world. My point is that a basic question that development and humanitarian professionals should ask is, “How can my work impact upon slavery and non-gender based discrimination in the area in which I am working?” Asking such questions can help mainstream anti-slavery practice to development and humanitarian work and lead to the sort of qualitative improvement in practice that gender mainstreaming brought two decades ago.

An appropriate international struggle against slavery should also include attention to the need for safe migration: we should not tolerate the establishment of rules on migration that facilitate the trafficking of vulnerable people. Countries that establish such rules, like Qatar, like the UK, should be treated as pariahs and the terms with which they trade with the rest of the world should be altered. There is an hypocrisy in how migrant workers are treated internationally. On one hand we, as an international community, tolerate circumstance of injustice and poverty which compel them to migrate. We will then go so far sometimes to recognise the importance of remittances from these workers towards the development of their countries and reducing the poverty of their families. But the world still fails to ensure safe migration. At the moment in Europe we are witnessing carnage off our southern shores because of a wholesale failure of political courage in addressing this issue.

Perhaps it is another hard lesson of history that when the moral courage of political leaders fails in the face of prejudice and vested interests it is the vulnerable who are usually the ones to pay in the bloody routine of violence that ensues.

200 years ago people like Equiano and Clarkson in Europe, and in the Americas, Sam Sharpe, Nat Turner, Touissant, the Maroons decided, for diverse reasons, to try to end slavery, so morally repugnant did they find it. In doing so they took on a system that the writer Adam Hochschild has compared in the equivalence of its power to the oil industry today. In ending the slave trade through force of arms and force of argument in a mere 20 years they showed what could be achieved when there is the collective will and the audacity of ambition to do so.

Olaudah Equiano

Olaudah Equiano

Clarkson, Equiano, Turner and Sharpe, the Maroons, the Quakers, and the nascent trades unions have been substantially written out of the history of that struggle, first by Wilberforce’s sons, and largely forgotten subsequently. That historiographical injustice contributes not just to the misremembering of what happened, but the misunderstanding of why it happened. The achievements of 200 years ago were a classic example, in Bobby Kennedy’s phrase, of numberless diverse acts of courage and belief shaping the history of the time. Thus has it been, thus will it always be.

Whatever our differences one thing that unites us is that we are all citizens in this world. And that brings with it not just rights but responsibilities. We have the responsibility to remember properly. We have the responsibility to think and to understand. We have the responsibility to act. “Do to others what you want them to do to you.” And remember that when we act with common purpose, in spite of all our flaws and diverse motives, that still, together, we can overcome.

Good and Bad Practice in eliminating forced labour

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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.

Don’t mention the apartheid: Caste-discrimination and poverty in South Asia

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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.

girls-hanging

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.

The Doctor and the Saint: Arundhati Roy’s introduction to B R Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste

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Arundathi RoyArundhati Roy’s introduction to this new edition of BR Ambedkar’s classic work has not been without controversy. For one thing it has meant that this new edition has been rendered unaffordable to most Dalits (previously called “Untouchables”) across India. Gandhi had already called it overpriced at 8 rupees when it was first published. But then Roy doesn’t have too much good to say about Gandhi either, and her analysis of his life and politics is likely to upset many particularly those who have bought into his deification. Of course Gandhi was human and as flawed as the rest of us, and Roy’s focus with this essay is on an area where Gandhi’s record is least defensible: his attitude to caste.

Roy’s stature as one of India’s finest contemporary writers has meant that her introduction to the Annihilation of Caste has brought, Ambedkar, his disputes with Gandhi, and the still bleeding wound of caste-based apartheid in India to much wider attention across the world: I have even seen the great American actor John Cusack enthusing about this introduction on twitter!

Roy is a stunningly gifted writer and a justly furious citizen. Both these traits come together brilliantly in this essay, which combines an excoriating critique of caste-based apartheid in India with biographical sketches of Ambedkar and Gandhi and a careful discussion of the contention between the two men in the struggle for Indian independence and social justice.Ambedkar

Gandhi may have had much to recommend him as a giant of the 20th Century but he does not come out of this comparison well. Roy makes a compelling case that Gandhi maintained deeply racist attitudes towards Dalits and Africans all his life: once, for example, he compared the teaching of the Christian Gospel to Dalits as like preaching to a cow. Hence Gandhi consistently sided with vested Bramhinist interests in entrenching caste prejudice in the Indian independence movement and hence in the emergent state. One contemptible tactic that Congress used that demonstrated the prevailing racist attitudes towards “low” castes was to nominate “Untouchable” candidates to the 1930 provincial elections. They did this not to promote Dalit rights but to destroy the British-sponsored elections. They knew that the nomination of “Untouchable” candidates would make sure that no “respectable” Hindus would run as independent candidates for bodies polluted by the presence of “Untouchables”. When the constitutional arrangements for the new Indian state were under discussion Congress ensured that Dalits were substantially excluded from representation by refusing to allow a separate electorate for them as had been established for the less numerous Sikhs. Gandhi had even threatened to starve himself to death at one point to ensure that no separate “Untouchable” electorate was ever established.

The attitude to caste of India’s founding generation is not an issue of mere historical curiosity. Dalits and other low caste and minority groups in India are still routinely subject to enslavement, rape, torture and murder with de facto impunity. And the impunity for these contemporary injustices was written into the modern Indian state by the errors and prejudices of those who founded the state.

Roy does not let her evident admiration of Ambedkar prevent her from giving a clear sighted portrait of him: she notes that as Gandhi was startlingly unempathetic towards Dalit liberation and empowerment so too Ambedkar had a dreadful blindspot towards the treatment of the Adivasi community of India. Roy recognises that the rationalist spirit that Ambedkar espoused demands that he is not deified but treated as the brilliant but flawed human that he was.

The Doctor and the Saint is remarkable work of advocacy, a passionate effort by a person of conscience to force the issue of caste onto India’s, and the world’s, political agenda. Given the violence and misogyny in large parts of Indian society and the looming election to the premiership of Narendra Modi, a member of the ultra-right RSS of whom she is scathing, at the time of writing, it also marks Roy out as a startlingly brave woman and an exemplary citizen.

Annihilation of Caste is a book of historical importance. Roy’s introduction does it, the cause Ambedkar espoused, and by extension all humanity, proud.

Boycotts in the history of human rights struggles

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The growing calls for boycotts of Israel and Israeli goods led me to reflect over the past couple of days on the role of boycotts in the struggle for human rights. 

I reckon Anti-Slavery International can (just about) claim credit for the idea of the boycott: in the 1790s: our predecessors in the Committee for the Abolition of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade advocated boycotting slave-produced sugar as part of the campaign to end slavery.

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The boycott was later introduced to Ireland by one of the greatest of all Irish leaders, Charles Stewart Parnell, in the midst of the agitation for land reform in the late 19th Century. He was desperate to obtain an effective means of non-violent resistance that would harness the energies of his movement and head off potential for violence as the conflict intensified. Shortly after proposing the idea it was put into impressive effect against the eponymous Captain Boycott in Mayo and his name has stuck to the tactic.

 

Charles Stewart Parnell

Charles Stewart Parnell

When delivered effectively boycotts can still be potent weapons. But they are also often blunt instruments: They can and do cause hurt to those they are launched in sympathy with as well as their oppressors. During the struggle against apartheid in South Africa activists were clear that boycotts of South African goods would also harm black South Africans alongside the racist clique running the country. However they judged that the level of harm would be marginal compared to what they were already suffering and the damage to white economic interests would be disproportionately higher.

Given the risks of harm to intended beneficiaries the boycott, as a weapon in the struggle for human rights, must be one of last resort. Anti-Slavery, in consultation with colleagues in Uzbekistan, judges that the state-sponsored child slavery practices in the cotton sector there warrant a boycott. There have also been suggestions of a boycott of the Qatar 2022 World Cup because of the routine use of forced labour by that country in the construction of the venues and infrastructure for that event. However the ideal would be that international pressure on the Qatari authorities would lead to increased opportunities for decent work for the tens of thousands of South Asian workers who have sought employment there as a potential route out of poverty.

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The conflict in Israel/Palestine arguably dwarfs these examples in terms of complexity. But if Israeli policy in the Occupied Territories continues to convince the world that that government has chosen the path of apartheid rather than peace, as former US President Jimmy Carter feared, then many may feel that the conditions necessary to justify a boycott have been met. Perhaps this prospect may eventually open the minds of the Israeli government to alternative policy responses to their illegal occupation of Palestinian lands and their siege of Gaza, imageaway from their current predominantly narrow, military ones. As the Palestinians pose little military threat to Israel there is little chance of a just peace deal being formed to resolve the military conflict. But the moral revulsion that Israel’s disproportionate assault on Gaza has provoked in much of the world, and their continued flouting of international law, may ultimately bring about a comprehensive boycott of the country and with that an increasing economic threat. Ultimately that may demand more just resolution of the conflict with the Palestinian people before international opprobrium becomes intolerable.

The Finish: The Killing of Osama Bin Laden, by Mark Bowden

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Summary: An account of the hunt for, and assassination of. Osama Bin Laden by the United States.

The Finish focuses on a number of individuals who had pivotal roles in this effort including Barack Obama as well as various special forces and intelligence figures.

It is a decent work of journalism detailing the evolution of American war making since the 11 Sept attack on the Twin Towers, particularly in relation to the integration of intelligence gathering and information management with special forces operations. However it is not the best work by Mark Bowden that I have read and it is not without controversy.

In Roadwork, an earlier collection of his journalism, Mark Bowden has written thoughtfully and highly critically on the issue of torture. Here he argues, with some discomfort, that a key lead in the hunt for Bin Laden emerged from a number of interrogations of different people under torture during the Bush administration. However the information gleaned from these interrogations was not recognised as important until advances in US information systems allowed for the effective analysis of the multitudinous quantities of intelligence that the US had gathered.

A practical (as opposed to moral) argument against torture has always been that the person being tortured will say anything to get the torture to stop. Hence the information they give cannot generally be relied upon. In her book Audacity to Believe Shelia Cassidy describes this very phenomenon in her account of her torture in Pinochet’s Chile. She also describes how her torturers had time to check every detail that she gave and so with repeated visits to the torture chamber were able to break her utterly. In this book Bowden suggests that advances in information systems which allow for cross checking of all sorts of information has automated the torture verification process that Cassidy’s interrogators undertook at such leisure. So such systems could become used in the future for continued justification for the use of torture.

Bowden acknowledges that his sources did not reveal to him how they actually turned the vague indication from torture interrogations into a solid lead on a real person. However Kevin Toolis, a filmmaker and writer who has made a movie, Complicit, about the use of torture in the “war on terror” argues that in the end the location of Bin Laden resulted from simply bribing a senior member of Pakistani Inter Service Intelligence to help reveal his hiding place. This corresponds with the Obama administration’s official position that torture was not used to locate Bin Laden.

This controversy over torture and a rather superficial treatment of the criticisms of the use of drones aside this is a gripping narrative and still provides a useful and thought-provoking insight into evolution of counter-insurgency and some of the moral questions associated with it.

Giving journalists a good name: Asking for Trouble by Donald Woods

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Donald Woods bannedDonald Woods was that very rare sort of journalist who gives journalists a good name: a brave and principled man who fought apartheid and, following the assassination of Steve Biko, which he did much to expose to the world, was “banned”, that is put under house arrest, by the South African government for his troubles.

He wasn’t always this though and his autobiography is an honest account of his education from a prejudiced youth to freedom fighter and prisoner of conscience, though he would probably never have described himself this way: his autobiography suggests he was a man who had a lovely sense of humour about himself and the world. This, and his passionate rage against injustice illuminates his account of his life reporting apartheid South Africa, which is told in the snappy prose style of a gifted newspaperman.

My speech to 103rd International Labour Conference, 28 May 2014

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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 political economy of forced labour and slavery

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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.