There is much international human rights law in the world, and in its midst there is a significant body of law on slavery.

But in spite of all this slavery is still widespread across the world. This is so for a number of reasons. First slavery is still in many places legal.

It is effectively legal in Saudi Arabia. In Qatar and United Arab Emirates the Kafalah system provides a legal underpinning for the enslavement by migrant workers by private individuals. In Uzbekistan and Tajikistan state-sponsored forced labour, particular in the cotton harvest, is used for the enrichment of the elites. In the United Kingdom trafficking of overseas domestic workers has de facto been legalised.

Slavery is also deeply institutionalised in North Korea, and as with Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, it is used to sustain the privilege and power of that country’s elite.
But, while the world often sees North Korea as an isolated place, consideration of the issue of North Korean slavery shows that it is not nearly so much an isolated thing.

The 2015 United States Trafficking in Persons report notes that, “Chinese authorities continued to forcibly repatriate some North Korean refugees by treating them as illegal economic migrants, despite reports some North Korean female refugees in China were trafficking victims. The government detained and deported such refugees to North Korea, where they may face severe punishment, even death, including in North Korean forced labor camps. The Chinese government did not provide North Korean trafficking victims with legal alternatives to repatriation. The government continued to bar [United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees] access to North Koreans in northeast China; the lack of access to UNHCR assistance and forced repatriation by Chinese authorities left North Koreans vulnerable to traffickers. Chinese authorities sometimes detained and prosecuted citizens who assisted North Korean refugees and trafficking victims, as well as those who facilitated illegal border crossings”.

All of this is contrary to China’s obligations to protect victims of trafficking under the Palermo Protocol of which they are a signatory. China’s failure provides means for Chinese traffickers to coerce their victims with the threat of denunciation to the Chinese authorities. It further sustains the institutional practices of slavery in which North Korea indulges, by effectively enforcing North Korea’s policies beyond its borders.

I would caution the rest of the world from getting too judgemental about this too quickly though. Here we see China indulging in something that the rest of the world also does: erasing an inconvenient slavery problem by the simple assertion, made with great conviction, that it is not actually a problem of slavery. Suggest to any Home Office minister or official that the UK’s overseas domestic worker visa is a license to traffick, and you will see this process in action here.

And of course the complicity with North Korean slavery is not restricted to China. In November 2014 the journalist Pete Pattisson exposed in the Guardian how North Korea trafficked construction workers to Qatar for work on the diverse building projects there.

As I noted at the outset Qatar has legal mechanisms in place to facilitate the enslavement of vulnerable workers by private individuals. One of the consequences of this is that the 2022 World Cup is likely to be the bloodiest sporting event since Julius Caesar’s funeral games. That fact has not caused the repudiation of Qatar in any international forums.

What Pete’s journalism exposed however is one of the sources of hard currency that props up the North Korean dictatorship is from North Korea’s sale of its people internationally. And that again has not caused any sort of repudiation of Qatar or those countries which also avail of the cheap labour of trafficked North Koreans. In October 2015 the UN Special Rapportuer on Human Rights in North Korea estimates that 50,000 North Korean workers are employed in foreign countries, mainly in the mining, logging, textile and construction industries and that the number is rising.

The UN Special Rapporteur estimated that the vast majority are working in China and Russia but others are reportedly employed in countries including Algeria, Angola, Cambodia, Equatorial Guinea, Ethiopia, Kuwait, Libya, Malaysia, Mongolia, Myanmar, Nigeria, Oman, Poland, United Arab Emirates and, of course, Qatar. If North Korea obtains only $10,000 per worker per annum this traffick in human beings would be worth half a billion annually to the dictatorship.

A fundamental issue that we see in many slavery cases, and exemplified in relation to North Korea, is that it is an international issue and needs therefore to be tackled internationally. The importance of international law, and international rule of law is exemplified in relation to North Korea. I suspect that like the UK China’s equivalent of the ministerial code has no mention of international law and so ministers considering their policy in relation to North Korean refugees and victims of trafficking are able to lightly dismiss their human rights obligations and those under the Palermo protocol.

The case of North Korea also shows that slavery must become a central issue of diplomacy. The easy acquiescence that the international community has in the slavery practices of other countries, aside from its moral bankruptcy, is also now a security risk. If the North Korean elite were not obtaining hard currency from the international trafficking of its citizens it would be that much more difficult for the dictatorship to cling to power.

I wonder do many consumers consider the risk of North Korean forced labour in garments that they purchase from China. Whether they do or not again the issue of the enslavement of North Korean exposes the need for new international law. Franklin Roosevelt effectively ended child labour in the United States by banning its use in inter-state commerce. President Obama has taken a leaf from Roosevelt’s book in introducing powers to exclude slavery tainted sea-food from the US.

The European Union should follow suite and establish similar general powers that could be used against the import or any goods manufactured with the use of forced labour, including that for trafficked North Koreans. Such a measure would have repercussions through the entire global political economy by causing real economic threat to those countries that have come to routinely use forced labour of vulnerable workers.

We see much that is horrible and distressing when we look at the institutions of slavery in North Korea, including our own reflection: that of the rest of the world at best standing idly by, at worst benefiting.

That needs to come to an end, not merely with fine words, but with robust and clear sighted international action. I hope the UK, for as long as it is part of Europe, will begin to provide proper leadership on this and bring the authority of the world’s largest single market to bear on this vital human rights issue.

Thomson Reuters Foundation, 16 Nov 2015

It is rare these days to come across anybody who explicitly supports slavery. Certainly there are those perpetrators who would like you to believe that they are doing their victims a favour. But by and large the political and business elites of the world are united in their condemnation of slavery, and will uniformly express anguish at the thought of children and vulnerable workers being subject to the cruelties of traffickers.  However that apparent consensus masks a more complex reality.

Slavery is a profoundly political issue, both in that it is about power and exclusion from power, and in that it is a hugely contentious subject touching upon some of the most disputed areas of international law and policy.

Indeed some even contend that slavery is not a political issue at all, that it is merely a technical one, and principally one of law enforcement at that. This perspective seems to be a favoured one of the current British Government, the Catholic Hierarchy of England and Wales, and a few naive philanthropists. They seem to regard the ending of slavery as a relatively straightforward matter that requires evil people to be locked up by decent cops.

There are however some profound problems with that view. For a start it presumes that slavery is everywhere illegal. But this is a tenuous presumption.

For example many of you will be familiar with the reports of systematic use of forced labour in Qatar to build the infrastructure for the World Cup. Or some of you may have seen the BBC Newsnight report from 12 Nov in which an Indian domestic worker in Saudi Arabia described have her arm chopped off by her employer as a punishment. It should be noted that the Saudi authorities dispute her account, saying she lost her arm “trying to escape”, and in denying complicity in mutilation they confirm complicity in slavery.

At the root of both these systems of enslavement is what is called the Kafala system, which is a “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 leave the country to go home.

It is a cynical system to legally facilitate medieval levels of exploitation up to and including slavery across the entire Arabian peninsula.

It is also essentially the same system that the UK government has in place for migrant domestic workers to this country. The UK system of overseas domestic workers visas ties workers to employers to such an extent that it de facto legalises the trafficking for forced domestic servitude. Migrant domestic workers know that if they try to leave the employer to whom their visa is tied, irrespective of their treatment, they will minimally be risking impoverishment and unemployment, and are likely to be deported. And 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.

In other words the cases of UK overseas domestic workers, and Arabian kafala show how too frequently the law, intentionally or otherwise, can be a means to facilitate enslavement.

Furthermore for law enforcement to be the only approach necessary to end slavery also presumes that genuine rule of law exists in a jurisdiction, rather than laws being regarded as merely suggestions to the elite. For example in India there is much decent anti-slavery law. And yet, corrupt police forces and overburdened court systems mean that such law is meaningless for those, such as Dalits and Adavasi, most vulnerable to slavery.

We saw this in the course of a piece of research that we did into forced and child labour in Indian garment manufacture. In this we spoke to children who worked in some of the garment workshops of Delhi. They told us that the only encounters they had with the police were when they were arrested and held as hostages to stop work because their employers had not paid the appropriate bribes.

In India there is also such limited labour inspection that it will never trouble those factory owners who enslave young women and girls to produce the cotton thread that doubtless forms a sizeable percentage of the garments we are each wearing this morning.

A few years ago I met a young woman journalist who was trying to write a positive story on the efforts to end the various forms of slavery in Indian textiles. She was threatened with arrest by the Indian police as an economic terrorist. I fear what sort of threats journalists or civil society in India would now face if they were to try to expose such abuses, given the increasing intolerance and clamp-downs on freedom of speech that Prime Minister Modi is enacting.

So: when you consider the contemporary manifestations of slavery and child labour across the world we see that an alternative perspective is necessary to the simplistic law enforcement one, one that recognises that slavery emerges in the opportunities for exploitation that are presented to unscrupulous individuals in national and international law and policy as it relates in particular to education and human development, employment, trade, migration and rule of law itself.

This perspective illuminates that there is much greater responsibility for slavery than evil criminal godfathers or unscrupulous business executives. Because slavery can only really thrive where governments fail to in their duties of promoting human development and protecting human rights.

A few weeks ago I was visiting cocoa-growing communities in Ghana. There the risk of child labour is exacerbated by the fact that too few of those communities have schools, and even if the kids get to school there is so little provision of vocational and entrepreneurial education for adolescents and young adults that many of them become vulnerable to trafficking for forced labour once they leave school, as they follow risky paths in search of scarce decent work.

And in India Prime Minister Modi intends to reduce factory inspections, and permit child labour as a means of reinforcing the caste system, amongst other so-called labour market reforms. Whatever Modi’s intention the consequence will be to make forced and child labour abuses much more likely across India and hence increase the likelihood that any goods or commodities produced there are tainted by slavery like practices.

In short: if, as journalists, you want to judge whether a government, or anyone for that matter, is actually against slavery it will require a deeper consideration of their policies and practices.

The UK government claims that it wishes to be a world leader in the struggle against slavery. And yet just this month Sir Simon McDonald, Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Office, said that human rights is no longer a priority in the Foreign Office, and instead was supplanted by the”prosperity” agenda.

We see that reflected in the warm embrace the British government has given to Prime Minister Modi and the prospect of trade deals with an India whose supply chains are rife with forced and child labour, and, even more bizarrely, with Saudi Arabia, who remain valued partners in spite of their systematic and entrenched practices of slavery, their intent to crucify a child for protesting for democracy, and their creation and sponsorship of DAESH, Islamic State.

Billy Connolly once said, ”Hypocrisy is the Vaseline of political intercourse”.

We see that clearly in relation to much of the contemporary political discourse on slavery, were many politicians and a few philanthropist crave the title “the new Wilberforce” after the British parliamentarian who obtained the abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in the 19th Century. However, unlike Wilberforce, most of these lack the moral courage or clarity of thought to challenge the vested interests and the political-economic structures that enable so much contemporary slavery.

We see this hypocrisy also in relation to the poisonous immigration debate across Europe. We have seen how establishing safe migration for vulnerable workers is a key issue in ending trafficking. Both the Arabian kafala system and the UK’s systems of tied visas offer opportunities of legal migration to poor working people that are little more than supply channels for the provision of forced labour to traffickers.

But the discussions on safe international migration remain mired in xenophobic cant, which both confuses and is confused by the political discourse on trafficking.

At the height of the refugee crisis in the Mediterranean this summer, we heard the insistent descriptions by European politicians of those who were facilitating transport of refugees across the Mediterranean as “traffickers”. Trafficking, by definition, is the movement of people for the purposes of forced labour or sexual exploitation. It was very clear, very quickly from diligent reporters on the ground in the Mediterranean that what was going on was not trafficking but the facilitation of smuggling. It is true that once these refugees get to Europe that they will be highly vulnerable to traffickers. But this is at least as much because of the failure of Europe’s leaderships to establish safe and legal migration routes, as it is anything to do with the smugglers.

To this day journalists lazily pick up this language from government press releases and repeat it as if it were objective and neutral fact. I heard on the BBC Today programme just last week smugglers being referred to as traffickers. In doing so journalists play into the hands of those politicians who wish to disguise their inaction in the face of the moral imperative of this refugee crisis by the conflation of smuggling and trafficking. By obfuscating the issues they seek to buy political breathing space in the face of the mounting carnage. When faced with the horrors of the Mediterranean this summer, it was easier for politicians to make grand statements blaming migrant deaths on evil traffickers rather than doing their jobs by seeking the causes of the crisis and identifying more effective responses.

The idea of journalism as a Fourth Estate to hold the powerful to account is a foundational one in modern democratic society. But the powerful who benefit from slavery are not used to being held to account. Often they are used to wealth and respect within their own societies, and to warm receptions in international capitals as “partners in prosperity”. They have been protected in recent years first by the comforting myth that slavery was a thing of the past, and latterly by a new set of fairytales: such as the idea that all that is needed is better policing, or that a few cosy words between the rich and powerful are all that is necessary to uproot the entrenched systems of violence and prejudice that underpin contemporary slavery

The ending of slavery needs many things. But it certainly needs courageous journalism to confront this nonsense and to expose to the scrutiny of citizens the realities of slavery in our contemporary world, and the power structures that underpin it.

Doing that may never be a popular job. But it is a vital one.

Good luck.

Speech to Westminster event on modern slavery bill and slavery in international supply chains

I would just like to say a few things:

First of all I think it is fair to say that the fact that there is a decent bill is a tribute to the work of all the parliamentarians involved who contributed considerable time and effort into moving this bill from its original and narrow law enforcement focus to something that gives greater recognition to the humanity of the victims of the crime and the need to look at what is happening in the supply chains of goods and labour both abroad and in the UK.

It’s a particular privilege to be beside Sir John Randall and Fiona McTaggart today and to have the opportunity to thank both of you for your efforts and those of many other people of moral courage and conviction in the Lords and the Commons who made this possible.

Anti-Slavery has been working on the challenges of ending forced labour in international supply chains for many years, and we have been working for over a year now with parliamentarians, civil society organisation, businesses and lawyers to improve many aspects of the Bill and I would also like to take the opportunity to recognise those involved in ensuring that there is a transparency in supply chains clause in this bill. That there is such a clause is a result of business, trade unions and NGO members of the Ethical Trading Initiative, putting pressure on the government to introduce such a measure to level the playing field of international trade between those who wish to trade more ethically and those who are not bothered.

In truth had businesses not added their voice to this demand there would still be nothing in the bill. Adam Smith believed that it was the duty of states to regulate businesses. Today I fear that too many politicians regard their responsibility towards business regulation as being to ask businesses how they wish to be regulated. Which is a more progressive position I suppose than that of the Department of Business which seems ideologically opposed to any sort of regulation.

So I think there is a hard truth in today’s world: that the voice of business carries vastly more weight with government than the voice of conscience.

As Spiderman teaches us: With that great power comes great responsibility. Because while slavery is sometimes an issue of organised crime it is more often an issue of the contemporary political economy. By that I mean it is an opportunistic crime practiced by unscrupulous people who see a chance to exploit others to their benefit as a result of constraints and enablements they discern in the law, regulation and custom by which we conduct employment, production and trade in the contemporary world.

One very real consequence of this political economy is that each of us in this room is probably wearing at least one garment tainted, at least in part, by slavery. Whether as a result of the use of state-sponsored forced labour of millions in the cotton harvests of Uzbekistan, or as a result of the enslavement of Dalit girls and young women in the spinning mills of Tamil Nadu in India, or some other aspect of forced labour, including child slavery, in the weaving, cutting, stitching or finishing of the garments that end up on our high streets.

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 message to say now she could collect her daughter. She was dead.

Now frequently when businesses are presented with evidence of slavery or other human rights abuses in supply chains their defence is “But we audit our supply chains!” Such ethical auditing has been going on for years now. So it is 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 generally speaking 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 in, for example, the supply of cheap garments to our high streets, there is no consequence for those businesses or for any business executives who have knowingly made decisions to source from slavery. Their goods are not excluded from European markets. The executives are not held criminally liable. I am not clear if the lack of extraterritoriality in clause 2 of the bill, the slavery offence, is deliberate in order to guard such executives further.

So the transparency in supply chain clause should not be seen as an end but as the beginning of a conversation on how we should seek anti-slavery reform of the contemporary political economy. But for such reform to happen will probably require business people such as yourselves to start the process. And I am encouraged to see a room full of businesses and investors – in fact, this may be the very first time such a large group of NGOs, businesses, investors and parliamentarians has come together to discuss modern slavery.

Investors in particular can begin to change the terms by which we conduct business by engaging on behalf of the ownership on how businesses are responding to the risks of forced labour and slavery in their supply chains. Business leaders can ask this question of themselves and of each other: Are you recognising the risks of slavery throughout supply chains and moving to credibly reduce those risks by ensuring basic protections of workers in those supply chains? Or do you find you are doing business with people who hide behind the comforting myths of ethical audits but in reality care little for the lives that are destroyed in far flung parts of the world because of their decisions?

Businesses must also, I think, begin to engage more systematically with government on these issues. John Ruggie, the author of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, pointed out that businesses have the duty to respect the rights of workers while governments have the duty to protect them. But I am sure that many folk who are in this room today will attest to the fact that it is very difficult to respect the rights of workers if the relevant governments are, either through incompetence or design, failing to protect those workers.

The expansion of globalisation means that the international law governing this new approach to doing business becomes increasingly vital.

The risks of forced labour in international supply chains 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. Anti-Slavery International investigations in India have shown how the routinized 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 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.

These are not just national issues. They are issues that should be of concern of British aid and diplomacy if Britain truly wishes to be an international anti-slavery leader. And they should be of concern to all of you if you have the slightest interest in doing business in these parts of the world.

Business must once again take a central role in leadership of the anti-slavery struggle. Businesses can begin with more rigorous investigations of supply chains with the intent to identifying and remedying problems that affect the rights of workers and communities rather than focusing primarily on managing risks to reputation and brand. Where the causes of slavery or other human rights abuses lie beyond the control of businesses, they are very well placed to pressure governments to do their job of protecting human rights.

Many of you will be aware of the challenges of forced labour in Thai fisheries. Anti-Slavery International is currently working with a range of UK retailers, many of whom are in the room today, on a unique pilot project to identify and address the risks of forced labour in supply chains and empower workers to access remedies. This work is very much about partnership between business and civil society, risk assessment and due diligence, rather than the traditional “audit” approach. At the same time, the work in Thailand highlights how governments are failing to protect workers in a range of industries and business can play a vital role in putting pressure on governments to act properly.

I regularly meet business and political leaders who are forthright in their opposition to the very principles of slavery. I am pleased to see that many of them have also recently begun to publicly show the depth of their moral courage by also seeking practical measures to end slavery. Many have added their voice to ours to send a strong message to the UK government on the importance of transparency in supply chains.

But all of us here have some measure of power to do more. As the Modern Slavery Bill reaches its very final stage next week, I would also like to encourage all of you in the room and especially those that represent business and investors to respond to the government consultation on supply chains. Your response will be key in ensuring that there is parity and coherence in reporting, that those businesses that lead the way will not be undermined by those who choose not to report or make minimal efforts to disclose.

I would also like to invite all of you to build on the collaboration across sectors and work further with civil society on addressing modern slavery.

We can turn away and hope somebody else we sort modern slavery out. Or instead we can grasp what opportunities present themselves to us and strive for reform and emancipation, and in the process help change a moment of history for vulnerable people across the world.