Speech to semi-plenary session of Global Conference on Child Labour, The Hague, May 2010 

I will try to be brief as I am very aware that three quarters of the way through a conference on child labour with this sort of audience there is little that I can say that you do not already know.

I was very struck by the comment from the speaker Ms Nyunguna in the last session who stated quite bluntly the harsh truth that “We do not own this problem” of child labour. This I think is core to the world’s failure to eliminate child labour. However I would put Ms Nyunguna’s important insight slightly differently. It is that we would sooner own just about every other problem rather than that of child labour.

This is because as individuals and organisations we have to relate to a multiplicity of stakeholders and we will tend to privilege those most immediate to us, those who are the loudest and those who have the most power to advance or impede our own most favoured interests. Tragically for the child labourers of the world they rarely are in a position to make their voices heard to the powerful, hence their needs are most easily ignored amongst the clamour of other interests. And, when decision-makers privilege the priorities of powerful stakeholders over those of children in labour they will find no lack of stories to tell themselves that what they are doing is not only necessary but morally good.

The most common excuses for failing to act on such fundamental issues of human rights are economic. Paul Whitehouse, Chair of the Gangmasters’ Licensing Authority in the UK notes how the introduction of ships’ loading lines was opposed in the 19th Century by the British Government department responsible for trade because while it recognised that it would unquestionably save the lives of sailors it would also impinge upon the profits of ship owners. I do not deny for a moment that economic concerns are vital issues in the modern world. But if we allow them to become fundamental they will define us, in whole or in part, as a singularly unattractive sort of people, the sort who are prepared to tolerate the sufferings of others in the name of our selfish interests.

Some of the finest moments in human history have occurred when decision makers have unshackled their minds from the primacy of economic concerns. Modern historians recognise, for example, that Britain’s abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade cost the nation millions of pounds, a loss the nation was prepared to bear such was the society’s revulsion at the human cost of the country’s economic success. In the modern world child labourers are generally disorganised and distant from the powerful, obscured from view by the complexity of the global market and hence easily forgotten. Even domestic labourers in our own midst in Europe and America are sufficiently out of sight to have their rights generally ignored.

The last British Government, progressive on many issues, declared that it saw no need for a new international convention on domestic labour, despite cases such as Patience versus the UK demonstrating how easily, even for an adult, domestic labour can degenerate into slavery. The vulnerability of children is even more pronounced. And yet such risks are discounted in the face of the principle of minimising regulation.

In the coming months many other stakeholders may find reasons that they find morally convincing to oppose an international convention on domestic labour, or other measures to combat other forms of child labour, particularly in agriculture. But if we as a human society, as a community of nations and employers and civil society, allow such arguments to triumph in relation to child domestic labour and all the other forms of child labour it will be a terrible indictment of all of us.

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.