Academic | Government | U.S. TIP | U.N. | NGO
The Business & Human Rights Resource Centre (the Resource Centre) invited 19 hotel companies, representing more than 100 global brands with over 80 properties across Qatar, to participate in a second survey on their approach to safeguarding migrant workers’ rights in the country.
The coronavirus is not only claiming hundreds of thousands of lives, but is also causing a global economic crisis that is expected to rival or exceed that of any recession in the past 150 years. Poverty, lack of social or economic opportunity and limited labour protections are the main root causes and drivers that render people vulnerable or cause them to fall victim to human trafficking.
Crisis doesn’t make an appointment. The crisis of a global pandemic was no exception to the rule. Anti-trafficking organizations across the world have been forced to innovate and adapt both during COVID-19 and in post-crisis. Now is the time, more than ever, to share the field’s inventive and iterative approach to recovery.
Crisis doesn’t make an appointment. The crisis of a global pandemic was no exception to the rule. Anti-trafficking organizations across the world have been forced to innovate and adapt both during COVID-19 and in post-crisis. Now is the time, more than ever, to share the field’s inventive and iterative approach to recovery.
The case studies in this report document the experiences of anti-trafficking organizations that work on the frontlines in Thailand, Malaysia, Cambodia, and Vietnam and illustrate Freedom Collaborative’s impact on their activities. The four partners featured were chosen as inspiring examples of organizations that provide critical services directly to vulnerable communities, and also for their efforts in promoting the case for collaborating with other groups.
Global laws forbid the use of slave labor in the built environment, yet our buildings, and the materials that go into our buildings, are heavily reliant on slave labor. Most industry professionals are familiar with the once legal transatlantic slave trade of the previous centuries. Though slavery is now illegal in every country, it persists in various forms, from human trafficking to forced labor. This report defines aspects of modern slavery and the scope of the problem, and presents compelling reasons why we should care about the systemic use of forced labor in the building materials supply chain, including growing legal and reputational risks.
Congress passed the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 (TVPA) to inject “new potency in the Thirteenth Amendment’s guarantee of freedom: whether on farms or sweatshops, in domestic service or forced prostitution.” Federal criminal law has long recognized forced labor under threat of criminal sanction as a form of involuntary servitude. In 2003 Congress added a powerful enforcement mechanism: a private right of action permitting victims to hold their traffickers accountable.
In 2018-2019, the International Secretariat of the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women (GAATW- IS), in collaboration with eleven organisations across nine countries in Asia carried out a Feminist Participatory Action Research (FPAR) focusing on ‘Safe and Fair Migration: A feminist perspective on women’s rights to mobility and work’. In our study, FPAR is used as a framework and approach to capturing women migrants’ complex realities and perspectives on labor and migration. What distinguishes FPAR from conventional research is that it is deliberately women-centered and participant driven, the knowledge comes from the women (community) and owned by them, and based on their lived experiences, the research participants propose solutions so the research results become a tool to collectively organize advocacy actions.
Workers at a potato processing plant in Texas face abuse by their employers but choose to stay silent out of fear of losing their H-2A visas. Most are unaware they’re even victims of forced labor, or that the fees they’re required to pay to their supervisors for a visa are illegal. They don’t trust the authorities either, and fear retaliation for speaking out. It’s a reality faced by some 36,000 people a year in this border state.
Interest is growing in the responsibility of private companies to respect human rights. What was once a marginal issue is now a major concern of companies, as well as governments, intergovernmental and non- governmental organisations, investors and consumers. In July 2000 the UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, launched the Global Compact, a UN- sponsored appeal which called on companies to commit themselves to respect nine core principles in relation to human rights, labour and the environment. Hundreds of companies, including many of the world’s largest, have joined this initiative.
The research examines the practices and policies of labour inspectorates and the Metropolitan Police and their relationship with the Home Office’s Immigration Enforcement team. Findings are based on these agencies engagement with immigration enforcement action; frontline organisations’ experience supporting migrant workers; and cases of people who have insecure immigration status and have chosen not to report to statutory agencies as a result.
This scoping research explores ‘worker-driven social responsibility’ (WSR) as a tool for ensuring decent work in supply chains. WSR is an exciting new model for tackling labour abuse in supply chains that has demonstrably improved working conditions in a range of contexts. It is similar to collective bargaining in that it involves a group of workers jointly negotiating their rights, with the difference that it targets companies at the top of supply chains instead of direct employers. The report discusses why new models for addressing labour abuse in supply chains are needed and whether the WSR model could be suitable to the UK, especially to sectors where outsourcing is common.
This briefing examines the impact of the Coronavirus pandemic on the risk of labour exploitation in low-paid and insecure employment in the UK. Drawing on interviews with workers and frontline services, it proposes emergency measures to ensure all workers are protected against financial destitution and exploitation while the UK works to contain the virus and its impact.
The COVID-19 pandemic is ravaging lives and livelihoods around the world – causing unprecedented socio-economic crises, massive displacement arising due to job losses, and at the same time, exposing the vulnerabilities of a highly globalised economy. As of April 9th, India has reported 5734 cases of COVID-19 while Indonesia has recorded 2956 cases, Sri Lanka 189 cases, and Cambodia 118 cases.
In August, 2019, Stop the Traffik Kenya (STTK) and Freedom Collaborative (FC), a project operated by Liberty Shared, launched a data collection effort with civil society organisations (CSOs) in Kenya to report known human trafficking and high-risk migration routes based on their work with survivors and at-risk populations. Data was gathered from partners over the course of one month to demonstrate how much knowledge can be made available when each organisation is sharing their individual data.
The size and scope of the global forced migration crisis are unprecedented. Almost 66 million people worldwide have been forced from home by conflict. If recent trends continue, this figure could increase to between 180 and 320 million people by 2030. This global crisis already poses serious challenges to economic growth and risks to stability and national security, as well as an enormous human toll affecting tens of millions of people. These issues are on track to get worse; without significant course correction soon, the forced migra- tion issues confronted today will seem sim- ple decades from now.
Probably nowhere more than in Libya have the definitional lines between migrant smuggling and human trafficking become as blurred or contested. Hundreds of thousands of migrants have left Libya’s shores in the hope of a new life in Europe; tens of thousands have died in the process. The inhumane conditions migrants face in Libya are well documented. The levels of brutality and exploitation they experience in Libya’s turbulent transitional environment have led to smuggling and trafficking groups being bundled under one catch-all heading by authorities and policymakers, and targeted as the root cause of the migration phenomenon. In many respects, this would appear to conveniently serve the interests of EU leaders and governments, who choose to disguise the anti-migration drive they urgently seek support for behind a policy of cracking down on both trafficking and smuggling rings, which they conflate as a common enemy, and one and the same. Given the highly complex context of Libya, this report proposes instead that any intervention to address the so-called migrant crisis should place the human rights of migrants at its centre, as opposed to necessarily demonizing smugglers, who are often the migrants’ gatekeepers to a better existence elsewhere.
Discussions about human trafficking data sometimes seem surprisingly abstract, as if research is most centrally about counting things from some distance: approximating “head counts” of global prevalence, formulating statistics, calculating metrics or constructing maps to illustrate geographic “hot-spots”, “routes” or “hubs”. All of these exercises, done well, can play a role in contributing to our understanding of human trafficking. But, even at their best, they are only a partial path to improved understanding and, moreover, sometimes seem to obscure the fact that human trafficking is, first and foremost, about human beings.
This document discusses experiences in developing and implementing a trafficking prevention project in a town in Albania, inspired by and drawing on a particular approach to behavioural and social change called “positive deviance” (PD). It is intended as a resource for practitioners working in the field of trafficking prevention and it is hoped that it can be useful for others who are considering implementing a similar approach or methodology.
Combatting trafficking in persons (TIP) requires evidence-based knowledge – to effectively target prevention efforts, design appropriate protection interventions or pursue effective prosecutions. This requires methodologically rigorous, reliable and ethical data collection as well as objective and insightful analysis and use of that data. It also requires guarding against weak or faulty data, which has the potential to cause disproportionate harm, including to trafficking victims, when used to design or support ill-conceived and ungrounded public policy and programmatic interventions on TIP.
This publication is part of a series of studies produced in the context of the NEXUS Institute’s research project entitled Good Practice in Global Data Collection on Trafficking in Persons: The Science (and Art) of Understanding TIP. The objective in this research series is to address the identification and elaboration of good practice in ways that will help guide organizations, institutions, researchers and others to strengthen their data collection and accelerate the collective acquisition of important knowledge about human trafficking.
This research review compiled published research on the issue of trafficking in persons (TIP) in five of the Mekong countries – Cambodia, Lao PDR, Myanmar, Thailand and Viet Nam – between 2008 and 2018. This included both peer reviewed and “grey” literature4 accessed in library-based and internet searches according to a pre- determined set of criteria and based on specific keywords and research strings. They analyzed a total of 480 studies on trafficking in persons (TIP) in five of the Mekong countries published from 2008 to 2018.
Research suggests connections exist between migration and criminal forms of exploitation such as human trafficking, forced labour and modern slavery. Certainly, constellations of risk are seen in certain migrant communities and migration corridors. However, it is not known how many of the world’s estimated 40 million victims of modern slavery are also migrants.
The primary aim of the study was to provide baseline estimates of prevalence of forced labour among children (aged 10 – 17 years) and adults (aged 18 and over) working in the cocoa sector in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, as well as updated estimates of the number of children (aged 10 to 17 years) exposed to child labour.
While previous qualitative research has exposed select forms of modern slavery in the Pacific, this report provides a comprehensive assessment of modern slavery in the region. The report draws on existing peer-reviewed and grey literature, Walk Free’s 2019 assessment of action taken by governments to address modern slavery, as well as information gathered through semi-structured interviews with anti-slavery stakeholders in eight countries in the region: Australia, Fiji, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, and Vanuatu.