* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.
As the world marks International Day for the Abolition of Slavery, we must boost efforts to end modern slavery by 2030
Dr. Katarina Schwarz is the Rights Lab Associate Director (Law and Policy Programme) and Assistant Professor of Antislavery Law and Policy at the University of Nottingham
Today on International Day for the Abolition of Slavery, the University of Nottingham’s Rights Lab is hosting the Universitas 21 annual Early Career Researcher (ECR) Workshop, bringing together more than 40 international researchers to form a new global network of ECRs who research modern slavery.
The global meeting is the most international and interdisciplinary group of early career researchers ever assembled on the topic of modern slavery. By the time the meeting ends, the group will have mapped the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) target for ending slavery (target 8.7) to all the other SDGs, identifying a way forward for tackling slavery as a key SDG issue.
In the five years since the collective agreement was made by all 193 UN member states, we have seen great gains in international collaboration and coordination to work towards ending modern slavery. Yet, there is still much work to be done.
In 2015, all States committed themselves to taking ‘immediate and effective’ antislavery measures. It’s difficult to imagine such measures not including legal prohibition
of slavery — legislation, after all, is a fundamental first step towards effective antislavery. However, almost half of all countries in the world have yet to make it a crime to enslave another human being. Legal ownership of people was indeed abolished in all countries over the course of the last two centuries.
But in many countries it has not been criminalised. In almost half of the world’s countries, there is no criminal law penalising either slavery or the slave trade. In 94 countries, you cannot be prosecuted and punished in a criminal court for enslaving another human being.
While many States have taken action in the past five years to improve their antislavery and anti-trafficking laws, we need to make giant leaps forward to scale-up antislavery efforts — to work at pace, and on a large-scale. ILO and Walk Free estimates suggest that 40.3 million people across the world experienced modern slavery in 2016.
This is a huge number of people that must be empowered to exit slavery and supported towards sustained liberation. Early in 2019, this would have meant freeing 9,000 people from modern slavery every day if we hope to achieve SDG 8.7 by 2030. Now, it means over 12,000 people every day — and that’s without accounting for increases in exploitation made likely by crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic. On top of that, we must develop ways to effectively prevent thousands of new cases of exploitation from arising — creating the social, political, and economic conditions that prevent slavery from taking root in communities.
Refugees, asylum seekers, displaced persons, and irregular migrants have all been recognised as communities particular ‘at-risk’ of exploitation. Given the increasing number of people migrating globally — whether as a result of displacement or in the pursuit of economic opportunity — our antislavery work must grapple with the specific challenges, identities, and vulnerabilities of people on the move.
Antislavery is not only for public and third sector actors — private sector antislavery action is also a critical piece of the puzzle, and necessary to effectively and sustainably address human exploitation. In the past five years, we have witnessed corporate leaders across the globe taking the initiative to be antislavery champions. Governments have also taken the challenge of addressing modern slavery in supply chains, with several countries (including the UK, Australia, France, and the Netherlands) enacting laws to address corporate antislavery obligations.
In order to know that these approaches are working, and to ensure we are investing in the right interventions, we need robust evidence. We need to understand what works, where, and for whom. The past five years have seen increasing impetus for rigorous monitoring and evaluation of antislavery efforts. International organisations, governments, civil society, and funders have integrated monitoring and evaluation activities into their work, and made this a priority.
In the next five years, we need to double-down on this focus. Investments in monitoring and evaluation must continue to be priorities. But more than this, we need international coordination around this assessment to collect and develop comparable datasets that can tell us about what works on broader scale. And we need honesty about what doesn’t work, so we can learn the lessons of these efforts too. By doing this we can measure success, double down on what works, and then scale up.
As we pass the five-year mark on the SDGs and enter the next 10 years of antislavery, many evidence-gaps and challenges remain. This moment is not simply about accelerating our efforts — given what we are seeing, we need to seriously reckon with the potential direction of antislavery movements at this moment in time.
We stand in a time of crisis that raises these obstacles even higher.
But it also represents a pivotal moment — an opportunity to embed protective measures into our governance frameworks and into our social frameworks that will actually serve to better protect people longer term.
