In the decades following the globalization of the world economy, trafficking, forced labor and modern slavery have emerged as significant global problems. States negotiated the Palermo Protocol in 2000 under which they agreed to criminalize trafficking, primarily understood as an issue of serious organized crime. Sixteen years later, leading academics, activists and policy makers from international organizations come together in this edited volume and adopt an inter-disciplinary, multi-stakeholder approach to revisit trafficking through the lens of labor migration and extreme exploitation and, in the process, rethink the law and governance of trafficking. This volume considers many key factors, including the evolving international law on trafficking, the relationship between trafficking, slavery, indenture and domestic migration law and policy as well as newly emergent techniques of governance, including indicators, all with a view to furthering prospects for lasting economic justice in a globalized world.

"Trafficking typically involves the movement of persons for exploitation for a third party's benefit. Inspired by the Palermo protocols, several states today criminalize trafficking, and it is perceived as an issue of serious organized crime. This edited volume brings together academics, activists and officials from international organizations who believe that the choice of a criminal law response arose from a particular alignment of geo-political interests of developed countries in the wake of globalization. Adopting an inter-disciplinary, multi-stakeholder approach, contributors to this volume instead understand trafficking through the lens of labor migration and extreme exploitation and consequently rethink both the law and governance of trafficking. This volume considers many key factors, including the evolving international law on trafficking, the relationship between trafficking and domestic migration law and policy, as well as newly emergent techniques of governance including indicators, with a view to exploring prospects for economic justice in a globalized world"--

Over the last decade, the world’s largest corporations – from The Coca Cola Company to Amazon, Apple to Unilever – have taken up the cause of combatting modern slavery. Yet, by most measures, across many sectors and regions, severe labour exploitation continues to soar. Corporate social responsibility is not working. Why? In this landmark book, Genevieve LeBaron lifts the lid on a labour governance regime that is severely flawed and limited. She takes a close-up look at the millions of corporate dollars spent on anti-slavery networks, NGO partnerships, lobbying for new transparency legislation, and investment in social auditing and ethical certification schemes, to show how such efforts serve to bolster corporate growth and legitimacy as well as government reputations, whilst failing to protect the world’s most vulnerable workers. To eradicate modern slavery and human trafficking in global supply chains a new approach is needed; one that confronts corporate power and profits, dismantles exploitative business models, and regulates the booming private industry of accounting firms, social auditors, and consultants that has emerged to ‘monitor’ and ‘enforce’ labour standards. Only worker-driven initiatives that uphold fundamental rights can protect workers in the contemporary global economy and make forced labour a thing of the past.

This edited volume examines contemporary global discourses on trafficking, forced labor and modern slavery from a variety of perspectives.

By reconsidering the definitions of human trafficking, slavery, servitude and forced labour, Vladislava Stoyanova demonstrates how, in embracing the human trafficking framework, the international community has sidelined the human rights law commitments against slavery, servitude and forced labour that in many respects provide better protection for abused migrants. Stoyanova proposes two corrective steps to this development: placing a renewed emphasis on determining the definitional scope of slavery, servitude or forced labour, and gaining a clearer understanding of states' positive human rights obligations. This book compares anti-trafficking and human rights frameworks side-by-side and focuses its analysis on the Council of Europe's Trafficking Convention and Article 4 of the European Convention on Human Rights. With innovative arguments and pertinent case studies, this book is an important contribution to the field and will appeal to students, scholars and legal practitioners interested in human rights law, migration law, criminal law and EU law.

This book examines the traffic in women for marriage, a phenomenon that has been largely overlooked in international efforts to address the problem of human trafficking. In contrast to current international and state-based approaches to trafficking, which tend to focus on sex trafficking and trafficking for forced labour, this book seeks to establish how marriage as an institution is often implicated in the occurrence of trafficking in women. The book aims firstly to establish why marriage has tended not to be included in dominant conceptions of trafficking in persons and secondly to determine whether certain types of marriage may constitute cases of human trafficking, in and of themselves. Through the use of case studies on forced marriage, mail-order bride (MOB) marriage and Fundamentalist Mormon polygamy, this book demonstrates that certain kinds of marriage may in fact constitute situations of trafficking in persons and together form the under-recognised phenomenon of ‘marriage trafficking’. In addition, the book offers a new perspective on the types of harm involved in trafficking in women by developing a framework for identifying the particular abuses characteristic to marriage trafficking. It argues that the traffic in women for marriage cannot be understood merely as a subset of sex trafficking or trafficking for forced labour, but rather constitutes a distinctive form of trafficking in its own right. This book will be of great interest to scholars and postgraduates working in the fields of human rights theory and institutions, political science, international law, transnational crime, trafficking in persons, and feminist political theory.

Over the last two decades, fighting modern slavery and human trafficking has become a cause célèbre. Yet large numbers of researchers, non-governmental organizations, trade unions, workers, and others who would seem like natural allies in the fight against modern slavery and trafficking are hugely skeptical of these movements. They object to how the problems are framed, and are skeptical of the “new abolitionist” movement. Why? This book tackles key controversies surrounding the anti-slavery and anti-trafficking movements head on. Champions and skeptics explore the fissures and fault lines that surround efforts to fight modern slavery and human trafficking today. These include: whether efforts to fight modern slavery displace or crowd out support for labor and migrant rights; whether and to what extent efforts to fight modern slavery mask, naturalize, and distract from racial, gendered, and economic inequality; and whether contemporary anti-slavery and anti-trafficking crusaders' use of history are accurate and appropriate.