SLAVERY TODAY JOURNAL
A Multidisciplinary Exploration of Human Trafficking Solutions
Volume 1, Issue 1, February 2014
ISSN: 2333-7222
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Unlocking the Science of Slavery
Kevin Bales, PhD
It is time to consider where we are going. To understand how we as scholars and activists make the transition from a simplistic, emotive, disparate, and disorganized global anti-slavery movement, to one that is complex, logical, unified and organized. It is clear that achieving that change requires scholarship and knowledge, “joined-up thinking” as the phrase goes. This new journal in reporting research, and creative anti-slavery actions and policies, is part of moving toward not just “the end of the beginning” but ultimately the beginning of the end.
Adopting an Anti-human Trafficking Law in the DR Congo: A Significant Step in the Process of Combating Trafficking
Roger-Claude Liwanga, J.D.
This paper highlights the necessity of adopting a comprehensive anti-human trafficking law in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The DRC ratified a number of international instruments prohibiting human trafficking, such as the Palermo Protocol, which recommend it to take legislative measures against human trafficking domestically. But so far, the DRC has not yet adopted a comprehensive anti-human trafficking law. With the increasing prevalence of human trafficking, the existing fragmented provisions on trafficking in the DRC (catalogued within the Law 06/018 amending the Penal Code, the Labor Code and the Law 09/001 on the Protection of the Child) are not sufficient to address the scourge, given the limited scope of their regulation of human trafficking. Countless victims of trafficking, particularly adults who are subjected to bonded labor, are unprotected by the law. Following the example of comprehensive anti-human trafficking legislations in the United States, Italy, Burkina Faso, Kenya or South Africa, the DRC should also adopt its own version of comprehensive anti-human trafficking law to increase its likelihood of effectively protecting trafficking victims, investigating trafficking offences, prosecuting trafficking offenders, and deterring potential traffickers. This paper recommends a sketch of a holistic anti-human trafficking law which is adapted to the DRC’s context.
Who’s Watching the Watchdog?: Are the Names of Corporations Mandated to Disclose under the California Transparency in Supply Chain Act Subject to a Public Records Request?
Benjamin Thomas Greer, J.D.
Trafficking is a highly dynamic and fluid criminal phenomenon. Determined traffickers react remarkably well to consumer demand and under-regulated economic sectors and easily adapt to legislative weaknesses. Corporate globalization of manufacturing and storefronts is contributing to human trafficking; aiding in forced labor in becoming the fastest growing and the third most widespread criminal enterprise in the world. As technology advances, allowing greater and easier access to goods from more remote countries, vulnerable populations become easier targets for traffickers to exploit. Understanding U.S. markets are key destinations for goods, enlightened states are looking to bolster their anti-trafficking criminal codes by requiring businesses to better clarify their efforts to discourage human trafficking/forced labor within their supply chains. The California State Legislature has begun an aggressive approach aimed at fostering greater public awareness of slave labor by requiring certain businesses to clearly articulate their anti-trafficking/anti-forced labor policies. California was the first government – local, state or federal – to codify mandatory policy disclosures. The California Transparency in Supply Chains Act of 2010 requires businesses domiciled in California and earning more that $100 million to conspicuously disclose on their publically accessed webpage, what policies, if any, they have implemented to detect and fight slave labor. The legislature intended to equip the common consumer with the needed information to effectively hold businesses accountable for human rights abuses. In order for the public to properly hold businesses accountable for their labor practices, it is essential the names of business subject to the disclosure be made public. The California Public Records Act should be a tool for concerned consumers and advocates to obtain the statutory list of affected companies.
A Truly Free State in the Congo: Slavery and Abolition in Global Historical Perspective
John Donoghue
The differences between slavery now and then are less important than the historical links that bind them, links in an awful chain of bondage that bind the history of the transatlantic slave trade from Africa to the resurgence of slavery in Africa today. As this article illustrates, nowhere is this truer, both in historical and contemporary terms, than in the Congo. The links binding the Congo to the history of human bondage were first forged in the crucible of early modern capitalism and they have been made fast by the proliferation of “free market reform” today, which despite the fundamentalist cant of its advocates, has hardly proven to be a force of human liberation; instead, placing the last 500 years of the Congo region in global context, we can see how capitalism has proven to be the world’s greatest purveyor of human bondage. The article concludes with an argument that the reconstruction of civil society in the Democratic Republic of Congo after decades of war, dictatorship, and neo-colonial rule depends crucially on the continued success of an already impressive Congolese abolitionist movement. Without making an end to slavery, once and for all, civil society can hardly prosper in a country where slavery has historically brought about its destruction.
Slavery was officially abolished in Ethiopia by Emperor Haile Sellassie in 1942. Despite the abolitionary law slaves and their descendants have continually been marginalized in the country (especially in the peripheral parts of southwestern Ethiopia) from the time the law passed until today. In the Gamo community of southern Ethiopia, descendants of former slaves carry the identity of their ancestors and as the result they are often harshly excluded. Today, not only are they considered impure, but their perceived impurity is believed to be contagious; communicable to non-slave descendants during rites of passage. In order to escape the severe discrimination, slave descendants change their identity by redeeming themselves through indigenous ritual mechanism called wozzo ritual. However, the wozzo ritual builds the economy of former slave masters and ritual experts while leaving redeemed slave descendants economically damaged. This study is both diachronic and synchronic; it looks at the history of slavery, contemporary perspectives and practices of slavery and slave redemption in Ganta (Gamo) society of southern Ethiopia.
Ending Slavery
Aidan McQuade, PhD
The issue of discrimination is a fundamental one in slavery: when we look at historical slavery in the Americas we see that racism was both a cause and a consequence of that slavery. Thus has it been, thus will it always be.