Human Rights Approach to Slavery is Needed
A human rights approach to contemporary slavery is required to effectively address the issue which effects up to 30 million people in the world today.
This is the view of SPP Assistant Professor, Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, who presented his recent paper A Human Rights Approach to Contemporary Slavery at a research seminar in the Department of Public Policy on March 24.
The past two decades have seen a massive growth in interest and advocacy surrounding human trafficking and contemporary slavery. Several academic approaches to human trafficking have emerged. While the prostitution debate is limited to a gender and sexuality specific focus, other approaches such as the criminal justice, migration and forced labor perspectives can be similarly limited in scope. In fact, Choi-Fitzpatrick argues, any approach to contemporary slavery that focuses on human trafficking is ignoring up to 97% of victims, as the vast majority of slavery victims are never trafficked internationally. A more comprehensive human rights approach suggested by Choi-Fitzpatrick would combine the human rights and slavery approaches to human trafficking to develop a framework suited to formulating strategies to combat slavery of all types.
According to Choi-Fitzpatrick, the most constricting limitation of the popular approaches to human trafficking and slavery “is the fact that each approach deals with trafficking as if it were the most recent instance of the phenomenon of greatest interest to each community: prostitution, migration, crime, forced labor, and slavery, respectively.
“The human rights approach has clear advantages over competing paradigms. It sheds light on the weaknesses inherent in current conceptualizations, which can involve prioritizing rescue over restoration and rehabilitation, emphasizing criminal prosecution over the wishes of the trafficked individual, ignoring the trafficked person’s ability to self-identify as something other than a trafficked person, narrowly targeting actors involved in trans-border criminal activities while ignoring other forms of exploitation, and so forth. A human rights approach, when combined with a more coherent and catholic assessment of [contemporary] slavery, lays the groundwork for a broader comparative analysis of various types of slavery and emancipation.”
The study is part of a larger effort to understand exploitation and emancipation in South Asia. Choi-Fitzpatrick interviewed rights violators, their victims, and the local organizations working to end bonded labor, a form of slavery.