Project member Aziza Ahmed has penned a terrific piece in the latest issue of Foreign Policy: “Think Again: Prostitution — Why zero tolerance makes for bad policy on world’s oldest profession.” You can view the article online here.
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Two of our Project members – Anne Gallagher and Martina Vandenberg – recently participated in the annual Trust Women conference. The text of Anne Gallagher’s keynote address, entitled “Human Trafficking: From outrage to action” can be found here.
]]>Marking the seventh annual EU Anti-Trafficking Day and the launch of Switzerland’s first annual Anti-Human Trafficking Week, earlier today, the UN Special Rapporteur on Trafficking and the UN Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Slavery hosted a panel discussion/debate to discuss the state of international law related to trafficking in persons and various forms of human exploitation, including slavery, servitude, forced labour, and debt bondage. Project Participant Anne Gallagher participated in this discussion, adding much-needed conceptual and definitional clarity — at a time when the tendency now is to simply conflate all of these practices under the label of “slavery.”
On that note, Walk Free has just released its inaugural Global Slavery Index — you can view it here.
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A hearty congratulations to Florrie Burke on receiving the inaugural Presidential Award for Extraordinary Efforts to Combat Trafficking in Persons “for her sustained dedication and unparalleled leadership in combating modern slavery through the development and delivery of comprehensive services, the empowerment of survivors to move from slavery to independence, and the transformation of policy to eradicate all forms of human trafficking.” So well-deserved!
The Comprehensive Immigration Reform Senate bill introduced in the Senate yesterday includes key protections against labor recruitment abuse. (See page 577 of the bill: Title III, Subpart F: Prevention of Trafficking in Persons and Abuses Involving Workers Recruited Abroad). Let’s hope these provisions remain intact as the bill works its way through the House!
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On March 6, 2013, student guestworkers from around the world held a surprise strike to expose severe exploitation at McDonald’s restaurants near Harrisburg, PA. The students guestworkers, who came from Argentina, Peru, Chile, Malaysia, among other Asian and Latin American countries, each paid $3000 to participate in the U.S. State Department’s J-1 “cultural exchange” program. They were expecting to come to the United States to experience cultural exchange and decent work that would at least let them earn back the fees. Instead, the student guestworkers experienced wage theft, sub-minimum wage pay, overpriced substandard housing, and intimidation and retaliation in response to their complaints.
Photo credit: National Guestworker AllianceAs this excellent report by Daniel Costa of the Economic Policy Institute — entitled Guestworker Diplomacy — detailed, the J-1 Visa Program has deviated far from what it was originally intended to do: from a State Department program to facilitate exchanges of scientific and cultural knowledge to what is now the largest U.S. guestworker program. J-1 visa holders from all over the world are now working in the United States as laborers on dairy farms, hotel maids, ride operators at amusement parks, and au pairs, among other semi- or unskilled occupations. Employers have every incentive to employ J-1 workers instead of U.S. workers, or even other guest workers who hold H visas. J-1 employers don’t have to pay prevailing wage, are exempt from Social Security, Medicare, federal and state unemployment takes. Nor do J-1 employers –unlike other guestworker employers — have to demonstrate that hiring the worker would not displace a U.S. worker. And best of all, J-1 employers get a free pass from meaningful labor scrutiny. The State Department has outsourced its oversight functions to the program sponsors (the companies that recruit the workers for the J-1 employers), who are expected to monitor themselves and report any regulatory violations back to a grossly understaffed compliance office at the State Department.
Try as it did with its post-Hershey reforms, the State Department has been unable to paper over the fundamental problem with the J-1 Program: it’s a labor program masquerading as cultural exchange. And as the State Department Inspector General concluded a year ago — it probably ought to be moved to the Labor Department and subjected to the same standards and oversight as other U.S. guestworker programs. Given the strength of the J-1 lobby, that’s unlikely to happen any time soon, however.
So what to do in the meantime? Support the work of organizations like the National Guestworker Alliance, which organized the student walkouts at McDonalds and at Hershey’s. And support passage of the Power Act to enable migrant workers to expose such abuses without fear of retaliation.
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Congratulations to Dr. Anne Gallagher, who was recently honored for her pathbreaking work on human trafficking. On June 11, 2012, Dr. Gallagher was named an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) in the Queen’s Jubilee Birthday Honours list, in recognition of Dr. Gallagher’s “distinguished service to the law and to human rights as a practitioner, teacher and scholar, particularly in the areas of human trafficking responses and criminal justice.” Earlier this year, Australian Minister for Home Affairs and Justice Brendan O’Connor conferred upon Dr. Gallagher the inaugural Anti-Slavery Australia Freedom Award.
The Australian government is not alone is recognizing Dr. Gallagher’s contributions to the field, however. On June 19, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton designated Dr. Gallagher a 2012 Trafficking in Persons Hero at the launch of the 2012 U.S. Department of State Trafficking in Persons Report.
]]>The term human trafficking refers to the trade in human beings, within and between countries, for the purpose of their exploitation. Over the past few years, human trafficking has moved from the margins to the mainstream of international political discourse. Trafficking is now widely recognised as a major revenue earner for transnational organised criminal groups and a source of political, social and economic insecurity for States as well as for individuals. Few countries have escaped the effects of this increasingly sophisticated and invariably brutal phenomenon.
]]>In recent years, the issue of human trafficking – the recruitment or movement of persons by means of coercion or deception into exploitative labor or slavery-like practices – has moved from the margins to the mainstream political agenda. The rapid proliferation of international, regional and domestic anti-trafficking laws bespeaks universal condemnation of the practice, but belies deep divisions among States over how to define and approach the problem. It is thus significant that the international community was able to reach consensus and conclude a new international law on trafficking – the Palermo Protocol. But just weeks before the signing of the Protocol, the United States passed domestic anti-trafficking legislation with unsettling global reach. Authorizing unilateral sanctions against countries that fail to meet U.S. minimum standards for eliminating trafficking, the U.S. law provides a ready means for injecting U.S. domestic anti-trafficking norms into the international arena.
This Article examines the significance of the U.S. sanctions regime for the fragile new international cooperation framework established under the Protocol. This Article begins by situating the U.S. rise to dominance in broader historical and political context, describing the controversies that plagued development of the Protocol and continue to influence U.S. trafficking policy. The Article then examines critiques of U.S. unilateralism through the lens of international law, and derives a critical framework for assessing the U.S. sanctions regime. Having established context and methodology, the Article assesses the sanctions regime’s capacity to promote progressive development of transnational anti-trafficking norms, and concludes with a modest proposal for improvement.
]]>In the decade since it became a priority on the United States’ national agenda, the issue of human trafficking has spawned enduring controversy. New legal definitions of “trafficking” were codified in international and U.S. law in 2000, but what conduct qualifies as “trafficking” remains hotly contested. Despite shared moral outrage over the plight of trafficked persons, debates over whether trafficking encompasses voluntary prostitution continue to rend the anti-trafficking advocacy community—and are as intractable as debates over abortion and other similarly contentious social issues. Attempts to equate trafficking with slavery invite both disdain and favor: they are often rejected for their insensitive and legally inaccurate conflation with transatlantic slavery yet simultaneously embraced for capturing the moral urgency of addressing this human rights problem. The antitrafficking movement itself has been attacked by those who believe it is built on specious statistics concerning the problem’s magnitude and by others who think it undermines human rights goals by drawing attention away from migrants’ rights and efforts to combat slavery in all its contemporary forms.
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