Ending Modern Slavery summary report 2017.docx

Fighting Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking: History and Contemporary Policy, 2021

Over the last two decades, fighting modern slavery and human trafficking has become a cause célèbre. Yet large numbers of researchers, non-governmental organizations, trade unions, workers, and others who would seem like natural allies in the fight against modern slavery and trafficking are hugely skeptical of these movements. They object to how the problems are framed, and are skeptical of the “new abolitionist” movement. Why? This book tackles key controversies surrounding the anti-slavery and anti-trafficking movements head on. Champions and skeptics explore the fissures and fault lines that surround efforts to fight modern slavery and human trafficking today. These include: whether efforts to fight modern slavery displace or crowd out support for labor and migrant rights; whether and to what extent efforts to fight modern slavery mask, naturalize, and distract from racial, gendered, and economic inequality; and whether contemporary anti-slavery and anti-trafficking crusaders' use of history are accurate and appropriate.

2020

Addressing Modern Slavery starts with familiar statistics about the "estimated 40.3 million people enslaved around the world" and the daunting task of releasing 10,000 of those each day if we are to reach the UN's Sustainable Development Goal 8.7 of eradicating modern slavery. In this book, Nolan and Boersma combine statistics, case studies and conceptual reflections to show how concerted efforts by governments, businesses and civil society could accomplish that daunting task. After summarizing the book, this review offers a critique of the current dominance of economic and supply chain strategies in the anti-slavery movement: dominance that is reflected in the focus of Nolan and Boersma's book. In Chapter 1, Nolan and Boersma outline the challenges of modern slavery, commencing with an admission that, despite growing public awareness about the problem, there is no globally recognized definition of contemporary slavery. They rightly question the connotations of the term "slavery," especially the way it establishes a triad of victim, exploiter and rescuer. They note that such a framework can "deny agency to those exploited," though they omit to note that this conceptualization also denies agency to the exploiters. I will say more about the importance of that omission later. On the definitional issue, the authors propose that "modern slavery should be seen as part of a continuum of exploitation" (p. 10). I think that's a sound approach, though as with any continuum, it raises a boundary issuewhere to draw the line above which exploitation should be counted as slaverywhich is one of the fundamental challenges for any attempt to measure the prevalence of modern slavery. Nolan and Boersma cite a vast array of examples, not only in this chapter but throughout the book. They document cases and statistics ranging from seasonal harvest workers in Australia, hand car washers across Britain, fishing in Thailand, preparation for the FIFA World Cup in Qatar, debt bondage in Cambodian brick kilns, cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo, prison labor in the USA, state-sanctioned forced labor in North Korea, and so on. I believe one of the book's most significant accomplishments is the thoroughness with which these examples have been compiled. The authors' commitment to documenting the breadth of labor exploitation globally, as well as documenting the current range of commercial and legislative responses to that exploitation, is enormously valuable. Another theme raised in the first chapter is that "the global economy is built on the backs of lowpaid and exploited workers" (p. 22). This theme is taken up in Chapter 2, which describes the depth and complexity of supply chains and notes that "this mode of production generates immense cost pressures that are passed on to suppliers" (p. 40). Global business innovation outpaces regulation, resulting in a lack of responsibility for labor standards and human rights. As the authors point out, the small amount of legislation in this space lacks teeth, and often governments are complicit in the problem. Civil society is ineffective in dealing with the exploitation due to the lack of government support, and international organizations are useless because they lack local influence. Consequently, we rely on the very companies that benefit from labor exploitation to self-regulate. The chapter ends with the claim that "progress in the fight against modern slavery can only be achieved if this cycle is broken" (p. 71). However, after several readings, I am still unsure what the structure of that "cycle" is, or whether it is cyclical. Chapter 3 discusses the possibility of corporations developing their social conscience. Nolan and Boersma are emphatic that the business sector must play a role in ending modern slavery and JOURNAL OF HUMAN TRAFFICKING

Slavery Today Journal, 2014

1972

Instruments of the United Nations, U.N. Doc. A/CONF. 32/4 (1967). 3 Nanda, The United Nations and Regional Arrangements to Implement Human Rights, 21 DEPAuL L. REV.-(1972). 4 M. MOSKowiTz, THE POLITICS AND DYNAMICS OF HUMAN RIGHTS 98-99 (1968) succinctly poses the problem: [I]nternational human rights is still waiting for its theoretician to systematize the thoughts and speculations on the subject and to define desirable goals. Intelligent truisms do not necessarily add up to a theory. No one has yet

Societies Without Borders, 2015

Harvard International Review, 2009

Delta 8.7 at the United Nations University Centre for Policy Research, 2020

The purpose of the study was to examine what is known about effective policy to achieve SDG Target 8.7 in the context of crisis, by: (1) collecting and collating existing evidence on what works; (2) identifying the range of hypotheses captured in academic and grey literature, and the evidentiary foundations of these claims; and (3) conducting mixed methods analysis of strengths, weaknesses, and trends in the evidence base. As such, the overarching research question for this study was: What is known about works at the State and multinational policy level to address modern slavery in the context of crisis?

2018

Parliament designed the Modern Slavery Act 2015 to end modern slavery in the United Kingdom. The goals of the Modern Slavery act were to increase punishments for traffickers, hold businesses responsible for labor abuses, and increase maritime power. The criminal approach the Modern Slavery Act ignores what trafficking victims need to end the cycle and does not require that business be actively trying to end modern slavery. The legislation does not offer a path towards citizenship and pushes the idea of illegal immigration. The Modern Slavery Act does not allow account for the negative impacts of Brexit to immigrants and trafficking victims. The desires and aspiration of the Modern Slavery Act overshadowed by the criminal approach that ignores the human rights issues at the core of modern slavery.

Societies Without Borders, 2014

Press Joel Quirk's The Anti-slavery Project examines the evolving political project of the anti-slavery movement. Quirk is wary of the separation between historical and contemporary slavery, therefore, grapples with developing an understanding of definitions concerning slavery, legal measures that impact the interpretation and practice of slavery, the limitations and strengths of the legal abolition movement, and terms that create connections between "classical slavery" and contemporary slavery. As such, Quirk disrupts the division between historical and contemporary slavery by offering a new concept: the "Anti-Slavery Project." The Anti-Slavery Project is "an ongoing task, or undertaking which has gone through a number of phases, and to a distinct form of historical project" that is regularly compared to transatlantic slavery (5). Quirk investigates the discursive development of the anti-slavery movement in Britain, which has had international implications in the twenty-first century. An overarching argument in The Anti-Slavery Project is that little has improved with the implementation of legal abolition, as evidenced through the analysis of historical events including the legal abolition of slavery, history of the British anti-slavery movement and colonialism, and a discursive analysis of discrimination and debt. The existence of slavery and slave-like practices and the growth of human bondage are endemic to the failures of legal abolition. Quirk contends that the failure of legal abolition is due to ideologies that perpetuate difference and social discrimination. The method in The Anti-Slavery Project delineates that an interdisciplinary approach is central to conceptualizing slavery through history, the law, and politics. The Anti-Slavery Project offers three significant frameworks for relinking "classical slavery" and "contemporary slavery." Firstly, the Anti-Slavery Project situates the political history of slavery in Britain as a point of departure for international historical politics and anti-slavery. Quirk traces a political discourse of slavery by beginning with the abolition movement in Britain, for two significant reasons: 1) Britain produced a discourse of the anti-slavery project as a stark and solvable

Delta 8.7 at the United Nations University Centre for Policy Research, 2020

The purposes of the study was to examine what is known about effective policy to achieve SDG Target 8.7 in the context of justice, by: (1) collecting and collating existing evidence on what works; (2) identifying the range of claims and hypotheses captured in academic and grey literature, and the evidentiary foundations of these hypotheses; and (3) conducting mixed methods analysis of strengths, weaknesses, and trends in the evidence base. As such, the overarching research question for this study was: What is known about works at the State and multinational policy level to address modern slavery in the context of justice? Justice in this context is understood as encompassing criminal justice, civil justice, international justice, survivor engagement and support, and health policy and practice. The study further considers additional cross-cutting themes (applicable in the context of justice, but also in the parallel contexts of markets and crisis), namely gender, education, social policy, and climate and environment. Themes considered in the parallel markets and crisis reviews are also considered in this report. This study is intended to inform the development of a Policy Guide by Delta 8.7 and the global expert Working Group convened by the United Nations University Centre for Policy Research (UNU-CPR). The Policy Guide is intended to help identify the mix of multilateral and national policies needed to accelerate progress towards SDG 8.7 in the broad policy domain of justice. The Policy Guide is targeted towards an audience of multilateral and national-level policymakers. The review therefore focuses specifically on findings relevant to national and multilateral policy, within the specific area of justice