3071-The political economy of new slavery

David Ould 65
out that the risk is that the concept of trafficking will deflect attention
from the exploitation of the individual and encourage the construction
of moral hierarchies, as well as practical and legal barriers between
victims. This would allow policy-makers to obscure the effects of their
policies on the rights of the migrants.
The new definition does not regard trafficking as synonymous with
recruitment into prostitution, nor is it limited to dealing with prostitution
in the way that various conventions concerning the ‘white slave
trade’ were 100 years ago. It deals with what is in effect a modern-day
slave trade, by focusing on the recruitment or movement of people
in circumstances involving violence, intimidation or deception, into
various forms of exploitation, including prostitution, but also any other
forms of forced or slave labour. This means that it covers equally the
trafficking of women from Eastern Europe into Western Europe to be
forced into prostitution without any right to refuse, and the trafficking
of children from Togo, Ghana, Mali or Benin to work as child domestic
workers in Gabon or the Ivory Coast.
Over Easter 2001, the international media highlighted the trafficking
of some 30 Beninoise children on the ship Etireno to Gabon to work as
domestic servants or street market assistants. Following pressure on the
Gabonese authorities from Anti-Slavery International and partners in
Benin and Gabon over the previous three years, the port authorities
suddenly refused to allow the children from this ship to land. The ship
returned to Benin and the children were taken into the care of local
agencies, before being returned to their parents. This was rapidly
followed by reports concerning the trafficking of children from Mali
and Burkina Faso to the Ivory Coast to work on cocoa farms providing
cocoa for some 40 per cent of the world’s chocolate. As a result of the
publicity, international agencies, multinationals and the governments
of the countries concerned have begun to look at the issues more
seriously. This has served to highlight how little is really known of the
real working conditions on the hundreds of thousands of cocoa farms,
the people who work on them and the inability of current laws and
enforcement mechanisms to deal with such problems. It is also worth
noting that stopping the trafficking is only one part of the answer, as
it may only lead the children into alternative areas of exploitation if
nothing is done to tackle the poverty, lack of education and jobs that
put the children at risk in the first place.
Article 3(b) of the new UN protocol goes on to state: ‘The consent of
a victim of trafficking in persons to the intended exploitation...shall be
irrelevant where any of the means set forth in subparagraph (a) are