NGO Reports

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Uyghurs for sale: ‘Re-education’, forced labour and surveillance beyond Xinjiang

The Chinese government has facilitated the mass transfer of Uyghur and other ethnic minority1 citizens from the far west region of Xinjiang to factories across the country. Under conditions that strongly suggest forced labour, Uyghurs are working in factories that are in the supply chains of at least 83 well-known global brands in the technology, clothing and automotive sectors, including Apple, BMW, Gap, Huawei, Nike, Samsung, Sony and Volkswagen. This report estimates that more than 80,000 Uyghurs were transferred out of Xinjiang to work in factories across China between 2017 and 2019, and some of them were sent directly from detention camps.

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Federal Human Trafficking Civil Litigation: 15 Years of the Private Right of Action

Fifteen years ago, in October 2003, Congress passed a law allowing trafficking victims to recover civil damages for trafficking in federal courts. Trafficking survivors have brought a total of 299 cases under this provision, demanding justice from an array of defendants. This report analyzes a decade and a half of labor and sex trafficking civil litigation in federal courts. What are the trends, challenges, and innovations.? This report provides quantitative and qualitative assessments of the past 15 years of civil litigation under the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2003. It tracks the statute’s geographical reach, types of cases, victims’ countries of origin, methods of entry into the United States, case outcomes, and damages awards. Finally, the report identifies challenges that trafficking survivors continue to face as they fight to hold their traffickers accountable.

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USING THE OPTIONAL PROTOCOL UNDER CEDAW TO COMBAT HUMAN TRAFFICKING

This toolkit builds upon the foundational guidance already published, focusing on CEDAW’s Optional Protocol and the potential for human trafficking individual complaints. The toolkit provides an overview of CEDAW and the Optional Protocol; a snapshot of the CEDAW Committee’s jurisprudence on human trafficking; and maps out strategies to use this mechanism to protect the rights of trafficked women and girls.

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Ending impunity, securing justice: Using strategic litigation to combat modern-day slavery and human trafficking

The time has come to build an international network of lawyers and advocates who have the tools they need to bring the right cases to the right courts. In May 2015, the Freedom Fund and the Human Trafficking Pro Bono Legal Center brought together leading human rights lawyers, advocates, and litigators from around the world for a meeting in London. The conversation centered on how best to bring strategic litigation against states and private actors in order to combat trafficking and modern-day slavery. This document shares many of the key issues discussed at the meeting, including important lessons learned from successful litigation. It also highlights a number of persistent gaps that must be bridged in order to identify, prepare, and successfully prosecute cases that can lead to systemic change.

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MODERN SLAVERY: THE DARK SIDE OF CONSTRUCTION

Construction is a bipolar industry. On the public side, we create inspirational buildings, pushing the boundaries of architecture and technology; solving ever more difficult challenges. The dark side – the systematic exploitation of millions of vulnerable migrants – is rarely acknowledged, even by the clients and multinationals that commission and create our shiny new cities. Our sector is rife with human rights abuses. Bonded labour, delayed wages, abysmal working and living conditions, withholding of passports and limitations of movement are all forms of modern slavery.

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STAMPING OUT EXPLOITATION IN TRAVEL: Benchmarking the Travel Industry’s Progress on Fighting Human Trafficking and the Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children

Stamping Out Exploitation in Travel is a benchmarking report that presents key findings and themes from a study of 70 companies in the travel industry on their initiatives to fight human trafficking and the commercial sexual exploitation of children. The report establishes a way to measure progress, identifies the baseline for their engagement, and highlights best practices to encourage cross-learning within the travel industry.

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Survivor Insights: The Role of Technology in Domestic Minor Sex Trafficking

In an effort to strategically inform technology initiatives for combating domestic minor sex trafficking (DMST), Thorn partnered with Dr. Vanessa Bouché at Texas Christian University to survey survivors about their experiences. The survey focused on understanding what role technology played in a victim’s recruitment into, time while in, and exit from DMST.

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Pathways to Justice: How grassroots organisations are harnessing the law to tackle modern slavery

This report surveys the portfolio of legal work being carried out by the Freedom Fund’s NGO partners across seven modern slavery hotspots. Frontline legal interventions are classified into four key categories that respond to the issues that these organisations are trying to address – strengthening laws and regulations, supporting effective enforcement, building rights awareness and facilitating access to justice. The report focuses on the solutions that frontline NGOs have found, drawing out lessons from these interventions that are relevant to the wider anti-slavery community.

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Ethical Recruitment: Translating Policy into Practice

Improving the practices involved in the recruitment of international migrant workers is a priority for companies, governments, and non-governmental organisations seeking to address forced labour risks. However, to date, there has been little publicly accessible information covering the challenges and achievements of real-world attempts to make responsible recruitment a reality. Global seafood producer Thai Union (TU) began implementing its Ethical Migrant Recruitment Policy (the Policy) in 2016. In order to understand the successes and challenges of TU’s efforts, Humanity United and the Freedom Fund commissioned Impactt to conduct an independent, six-month evaluation in 2018.

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Workers’ Rights in Supermarket Supply Chains: New Evidence on the Need for Action

This Oxfam briefing note presents compelling new evidence that our food supply chains are rife with violations of human, labour and women’s rights. The paper summarizes new research commissioned by Oxfam, which shows the depth and scale of human suffering in food production in India and Brazil among workers linked to international supermarket supply chains. The briefing note identifies company laggards on workers’ rights, makes clear that progress is possible and where it is being made, and puts forward a framework for action with important steps for supermarkets to take to end human suffering in their supply chains.

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Rohingya refugees’ perspectives on their displacement in Bangladesh: Uncertain futures

While there is good understanding of the short-term needs of Rohingya refugees and their perspectives, this does not appear to be informing planning for the medium term. This paper – based on qualitative and quantitative research with Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh – provides insight into the current political and policy context, refugees’ challenges and aspirations, community engagement and what could improve refugees’ lives in the medium to long term.

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2017 Federal Human Trafficking Report

The 2017 Federal Human Trafficking Report represents a long-lasting desire to capture and analyze what federal courts in the United States are doing to combat human trafficking. The Human Trafficking Institute undertook this project with the ambitious goal of capturing an exhaustive list of all the criminal and civil human trafficking cases in the United States. Through the tireless work of the Institute’s team members, this Report contains wide-ranging information about every human trafficking case that federal courts handled during 2017.

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“Because if we talk about health issues first, it is easier to talk about human trafficking”; findings from a mixed methods study on health needs and service provision among migrant and trafficked fishermen in the Mekong

Human trafficking in the fishing industry or “sea slavery” in the Greater Mekong Subregion is reported to involve some of the most extreme forms of exploitation and abuse. A largely unregulated sector, commercial fishing boats operate in international waters far from shore and outside of national jurisdiction, where workers are commonly subjected to life-threatening risks. Yet, research on the health needs of trafficked fishermen is sparse.

This paper describes abuses, occupational hazards, physical and mental health and post-trafficking well-being among a systematic consecutive sample of 275 trafficked fishermen using post-trafficking services in Thailand and Cambodia. These findings are complemented by qualitative interview data collected with 20 key informants working with fishermen or on issues related to their welfare in Thailand.

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FACT SHEET: Human Trafficking and Health Care Providers

Health care providers have an important, proactive role to play in combating human trafficking in the United States. With proper training, health care providers can play a significant part in identifying and caring for trafficking victims.4 Medical personnel can also document injuries, testify as expert witnesses, and provide affidavits for submission in legal cases. But in order to be able to identify trafficking cases, health care providers must be familiar with red flags and trafficking indicators.

This fact sheet highlights medical components of case studies drawn directly from federal criminal indictments and civil trafficking complaints. These case studies provide documented incidents that illustrate how human trafficking has presented in health care settings. It is hoped that these concrete examples gleaned from legal cases will assist medical professionals in recognizing red flags and risk factors.

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U.S. Legal Remedies for Minor Victims of Sex Tourism and Sex Trafficking

In 2003, the United States Congress passed a law to fight sex tourism and sexual abuse of children. Congress titled the law the Prosecutorial Remedies and Other Tools to End
the Exploitation of Children Today (“PROTECT”) Act.1 Under the PROTECT Act, any U.S. citizen or legal permanent resident who sexually abuses or exploits children, anywhere in the world, can be held accountable in U.S. federal courts….

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Time to break old habits: Shifting from Complicity to Protection of the Rohingya in Myanmar

This study outlines the need for the international community in Myanmar to dramatically change gears in their approach if they are to break out of a cycle of passive complicity with ethnic cleansing and make a more lasting contribution to protecting the persecuted Rohingya Muslim minority in Myanmar. The article analyzes years of secrecy, self-censorship and silent compliance with government policies of abuse. It calls on all actors to engage in more forthright reporting and advocacy, confronting government harassment more boldly. It further urges donors and agencies to stop all support to ethnic detention centres and to strictly condition all their future contributions and programming in Myanmar – linking such support to the granting of freedom of movement and other rights to the Rohingya.

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The Freedom Fund Annual Impact Report 2016

More organisations are joining the anti-slavery movement, and forward-looking businesses are beginning to seriously tackle the risks of slavery in their supply chains. But so much more remains to be done, with an estimated 46 million people still enslaved and exploited around the world. At the Freedom Fund, our focus has been on dismantling the local and national systems that enable slavery in countries with the heaviest burden of this crime.

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Forced Labor Action Compared: Findings From Three Sectors

Last year, KnowTheChain identified three sectors with the highest risk of forced labor in their supply chains and benchmarked 60 companies within those sectors. It was the first analysis of its kind, focusing specifically on forced labor risks and the corporate policies and practices developed by companies in response. In order to build on the momentum of this first set of reports, KnowTheChain worked to identify lessons and recommendations that can benefit companies across all sectors. This report is the product of those efforts.

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The Typology of Modern Slavery: Defining Sex and Labor Trafficking in the United States

Polaris analyzed more than 32,000 cases of human trafficking documented between December 2007 and December 2016 through its operation of the National Human Trafficking Hotline and BeFree Textline. This is the largest data set on human trafficking in the United States ever compiled and publically analyzed. The Typology of Modern Slavery offers a map for taking the next steps in creating a world without slavery.

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2016 Freedom From Slavery Forum Report

The Freedom from Slavery Forum was designed to provide a place for leaders of the global anti-human trafficking and anti-slavery movement to come together, share and discuss best practices and lessons learned, identify gaps in the field, brainstorm new ideas, and build relationships with one another. Additionally, the Forum is meant to educate the public about this issue. Accordingly, the 2016 Forum was a two day event comprised of private meetings among anti-slavery experts, followed by a public panel discussion on the ways the electronics and fishing industries deal with issues of slavery and trafficking in their supply chains.

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Understanding and Responding to Modern Slavery within the Homelessness Sector

Homelessness organisations and anti-slavery organisations have both been aware of links between modern slavery and homelessness, yet there has been little research into how these issues overlap and impact on one another. An initial scoping exercise was, therefore, commissioned in 2016 by the UK’s Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner, Kevin Hyland OBE, to gain a better understanding of modern slavery within the homelessness sector. The Passage, a leading homelessness charity, was appointed to look into this issue.

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“IF I COULD GO TO SCHOOL…”

Girl soldiers in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) experience severe hardships – both in the ranks of armed groups and after returning home. Programmes that support the release, recovery and reintegration of girl soldiers have so far been woefully inadequate. Only a small percentage of girls leave armed groups through formal demobilisation processes, and an even smaller number receive any assistance. Following extensive consultations with DRC-based child protection partners in 2012-2015, Child Soldiers International travelled to eastern DRC in early 2016. We conducted interviews with 150 former girl soldiers, and spoke to community and child protection representatives. Our ?ndings will form a set of best practice principles to improve assistance to former child soldiers, with a particular focus on the speci?c needs of girls.

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Financing Forced Labor

Sixty years have passed since the adoption of ILO Convention No. 105 (Abolition of Forced Labor Convention, 1957), yet a number of States have persisted in using forced labor for economic development, the eradication of which was a driving force behind establishing the Convention. Nowhere in the world is this problem more entrenched and pervasive than Uzbekistan.

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