By Keith Best
Speech delivered calling for an international inspection and registration agency in respect of modern slavery.
Your Royal Highnesses and dear friends,
First, I wish to congratulate you all in keeping alive and prominent this message of combatting this appalling trade in human beings when there are so many other distractions in people’s lives. Your perseverance and passion as well as your various actions are to be commended. There is little that I can say about either historic or modern slavery that is new to this knowledgeable audience. You will know that Anti-Slavery International estimates that some 50m people are enslaved worldwide. Most appallingly many of them are children. The sweat shops in China and India have been identified for decades and public and political pressure has forced change. Yet this traffic is not just in manufactured goods but is also for purposes of sexual exploitation of both children and women. The figures are sobering. 50% of trafficking victims were trafficked into sexual exploitation and 38% for forced labour. 67% of people trafficked for sexual exploitation are women. 46% of trafficking victims are women, 34% are children, and 20% are men.
Trafficking involves both kidnapping and coercion but also those who are desperate economically and fall easy prey to the traffickers who persuade them that they can be given a better life elsewhere – promises full of lies. When I practised as a barrister I did not deal in labour trafficking but often represented those who were used as mules in drug trafficking (in days where this was still more widespread until the traffickers discovered that it was more profitable to trade in human beings rather than narcotics). In those days women with drugs strapped around their waist under their clothes were told by the traffickers that if caught they would merely be deported – omitting to mention that there was a five-year prison sentence before that happened.
It would be wrong to suggest that nothing has changed: much progress has been made but the fact that we meet here this evening demonstrates that not enough has been done and so much more needs to be done. Legislation in this country the Modern Slavery Act requires large businesses to report on steps taken to prevent slavery in their supply chains. My own church charity asks all suppliers to certify that their goods and services have not involved slavery. Admittedly, we have to take their word as we do not have the resources to investigate further but at least it is a start and puts businesses on notice. As you know, s.54 of the UK Modern Slavery Act states that all UK businesses with a global annual turnover of £36 million must report on the steps they are taking to ensure their goods and services are slave free.
Fashion is one of the most labour-dependent industries in the world, as each piece of apparel travels through a complex supply chain. Lack of visibility further down the chain, however, has led the fashion industry to become the second-largest sector, after technology, to support modern slavery. As the website Unseen tells us that from the pickers harvesting the cotton to the yarn spinners and the workers manufacturing the garments – slavery and exploitation exists at all stages in the making of our clothes. Across the garment and textile industry, exploitation includes forced labour, little or no pay, paying in order to maintain employment, working long hours and being locked into factories, lack of, or inadequate, contracts’ lack of workers’ rights, including the right to organise and bargain collectively, lack of social benefits such as healthcare, sick pay or pensions.
Such conditions are especially prevalent in the major cotton- and garment-producing countries. Human rights organisations have documented considerable evidence of forced and child labour operating in countries like China and India (which produce nearly half of theworld’scottonbetweenthem), Bangladesh, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.
One fifth of the world’s cotton comes from Xinjiang, China, where there is significant evidence of forced labour specifically related to cotton picking. According to a 2021 report by Sheffield Hallam University, more than 100 international retail brands could be at high risk of using cotton that is produced by forced labour in the Xinjiang region, China. In June 2020 Labour Behind the Label published evidence exposing forced labour in Leicester’s garment factories. The report revealed that workers in these factories were paid as little as £3 an hour and forced to work without social distancing measures during Covid-19 lock-downs. In 2021, 10% of cases reported to the Modern Slavery & Exploitation Helpline related to businesses in the garment sector.
Findings from the 2023 Fashion Transparency Index shows that the businesses are starting to be more transparent on human rights issues such as worker pay, worker conditions, and purchasing practices. However, with only 1% of major fashion brands disclosing how many of their workers receive the living wage, there is still huge work to be done.
I have picked on only one sector and time does not permit me to examine others – but they all have their own issues about the use of modern slavery. The organisation Hope for Justice reminds us that climate change can cause natural disasters, which results in displacement and creates climate refugees. People who are displaced have the potential to be targeted for human trafficking due to their increased vulnerability and can be exploited in industries that contribute to climate change, so the two are linked. According to the World Bank by 2050 more than 216m people will be forced from their homes due to climate change. Coupled with the knowledge of other parts of the world obtained through a mobile phone so that we know more about conditions and what is happening on the far side of the globe than in our neighbours’ homes and the fact that, comparatively, it is now cheaper to travel internationally than at any previous period in history when it was confined to those with the means to do so we can see that migration and its more disreputable cousin, trafficking, will only increase.
Is it too much to hope for and to campaign towards the creation of an international registration and inspection body to certify that slavery has not been used in the manufacture of goods and services? We have standards which require the labelling of foodstuffs as to their contents, including those elements that can do harm like salts, sugars and chemicals so why not require labelling that assures that slavery has not been used in their manufacture? We have an International Atomic Energy Authority inspection regime (presumably to identify potential nuclear proliferation which could be harmful to humanity) so why not one investigating slavery (on the basis that it is actually harming humanity at present)? No doubt, there would be objection from countries in which slavery is still widespread – and you will know the names of the suspects – but one starts with a coalition of the willing. If more and more goods carry the certificate that slavery has not been a part of the process the general public can make up their own mind and boycott those goods that do not carry such certificate. In that way there will be a strong persuasion on other countries to join the regime if they wish their goods to sell. In any event, why leave this only to nation states? We should seek to persuade companies to engage in labelling their own products as being free from the taint of slavery. We have made a start through FairTrade and the label is an assurance to many purchasers. The charity Free The Slaves urges that we should make ethical choices when we shop and state “When you spend your money on slave-free goods, you help stop the flow of funding to human traffickers. Instead, you are redirecting funds to brands that provide a living wage, safe working conditions and sustainably made goods.”
Many different organisations around the world now help purchasers on such issues by identifying good and bad suppliers but that still requires a great deal of work for us to discover that when we all have busy lives. We need greater assistance. I urge us to campaign for a single, unified international “slavery inspection team” and labelling of goods and services accordingly. To take one example, Brazil has a Division of Inspection for the Eradication of Slave Labour. If it can be done nationally then it can be done internationally. Here, at home, we could start by urging the Government to follow Brazil and have an international inspection team. While at the UN we have the Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery, the Inter-Agency Coordination Group against Trafficking in Persons (ICAT), and various UN agencies like the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) we do not have a specific investigation, inspection and registration scheme at the international level.
That is my plea to you today – that we concentrate our efforts in finding institutional answers through such a regime to this abomination in the modern world that has no place in a civilised society.
Keith Best
Chair UPF (UK)
Former MP & Chief Executive of Freedom from Torture; Foreign Secretary’s Advisory Panel on Torture Prevention; Chair World Federalist Movement/Institute for Global Policy