Combating Slavery, Forced Labour and Human Trafficking. Are Current International, European and National Instruments Working?
| Published date | 01 November 2017 |
| Author | Jan Wouters,Axel Marx |
| Date | 01 November 2017 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12506 |
Combating Slavery, Forced Labour and Human
Trafficking. Are Current International, European
and National Instruments Working?
Axel Marx and Jan Wouters
Leuven Centre for Global Governance Studies, University of Leuven
Abstract
All throughout history, slavery has been a constant and a key factor in economic development. Also for many centuries slavery
and forced labour was legal. Only from the beginning of the 20th century onwards slavery became illegal and criminalized. Many
international commitments were made to address the issue of forced labour and slavery. However, despite these international
legislative efforts slavery, forced labour and human trafficking still persist today. New regulatory instruments have been
developed in recent years to further enforce these international commitments. These instruments aim to force private and public
actors to comply with the international conventions. Little is known about their effectiveness. Do these initiatives have any
impact? This special section seeks answers to this question by analysing different instruments and their implementation.
Throughout history, slavery has been a constant theme
(Bales, 2002–2003) and even often a key factor in economic
processes (Beckert, 2012). For many centuries slavery and
forced labour were legal, or at least not prohibited. In the
course of the 19th century the slave trade and slavery were
progressively banned by countries. After first initiatives at
the end of the 19th century, the slave trade and slavery
became illegal under international law in the first decades
of the 20th century. In the Slavery Convention of 1926,
adopted by the League of Nations (1927), the Contracting
States undertake ‘to take all necessary measures to prevent
compulsory or forced labour from developing into condi-
tions analogous to slavery’(Article 5, first para.), which in
turn was defined as the ‘status or condition of a person over
whom all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership
are exercised’(Article 1(1)). This was followed in 1932 with
the adoption of ILO Convention No 29 on forced labour
(ILO, 1932), which defines forced or compulsory labour as
‘all work or service which is extracted from any person
under the menace of any penalty and for which the said
person has not offered himself voluntarily’(Article 2(1)). In
1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted
by the UN General Assembly, laid down that ‘[n]o one shall
be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade
should be abolished in all their forms’(Article 4). The 1956
Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery fur-
ther defined and banned four additional forms of slavery,
including debt bondage and serfdom. In 1957 the ILO Aboli-
tion of Forced Labour Convention (Convention No 105) was
adopted.
On 18 June 1998, the International Labour Conference
adopted the ‘ILO Declaration on Fundamental Principles and
Rights at Work’(‘1998 Declaration’). It provides that all ILO
Members, ‘even if they have not ratified the Conventions in
question, have an obligation arising from the very fact of
membership in the Organization to respect, to promote and
to realize [...] the principles concerning the following fun-
damental rights which are the subject of those Conventions’,
including ‘(b) the elimination of all forms of forced or com-
pulsory labor’(para. 2).
Also in 1998, the Rome Statute of the International Crimi-
nal Court, criminalized enslavement as a crime against
humanity and defined enslavement as ‘the exercise of any
or all of the powers attaching to the rights of ownership
over a person and includ[ing] the exercise of such power in
the course of trafficking in persons, in particular women and
children’(Article 7(2)(c)).
In a further effort to address implementation gaps of the
Conventions related to forced and compulsory labour, the
ILO adopted in 2014 a Protocol to the Forced Labour Con-
vention of 1930. The Protocol requires ILO Members to
develop policies and action plans to address non-compli-
ance with the Conventions. Measures include educating and
informing all relevant stakeholders, strengthening labour
inspection services, supporting due diligence by both public
and private sectors to prevent and respond to risks of
forced or compulsory labour, and addressing the root causes
of the latter.
Finally, the world set itself an ambitious goal in Septem-
ber 2015, when world leaders adopted the 2030 Sustainable
Development Goals (SDGs) (United Nations, 2015). Goal 8
aims to ‘promote inclusive and sustainable economic
growth, employment and decent work for all’. Within the
context of Goal 8 the SDGs have established as a specific
target to ‘[t]ake immediate and effective measures to eradi-
cate forced labour, end modern slavery and human
Global Policy (2017) 8:4 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12506 ©2017 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Global Policy Volume 8 . Issue 4 . November 2017 495
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