3071-The political economy of new slavery

74 Trafficking and International Law
and capitalism, increasing uncontrollably each year. The reality is that
slave labour is not a problem that has reappeared just recently, but
rather a serious pattern of both traditional and modern forms of abuse,
which the world’s richest societies have tended to ignore, assuming it
cannot still exist either at home or abroad. It has been ignored because
it undermines our confidence in our own ability to put an end to the
gross violations of human rights from the past, such as slavery in the
Americas in the nineteenth century or forced labour in the colonial and
totalitarian regimes of the mid-twentieth century.
Notes
1. Mary Robinson, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, June 2001.
2. Inter Press Service (IPS), 21 October 2002.
3. United Nations Convention on Slavery 1926.
4. Ms Radhika Coomaraswamy, E/CN.4/1997/47, paragraph 133.
5. For example, in the Islamic Republic of Mauritania.
6. European Parliament Committee on Citizens’ Freedoms and Rights, Justice
and Home Affairs, 30 May 2001.
7. European Parliament Committee on Women’s Rights and Equal Opportunities.
8. An Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) Parliamentary
Assembly resolution on trafficking expressed concern that the laws in
many OSCE states ‘remain inadequate to deter trafficking, to bring traffickers
to justice and to protect their victims’ (paragraph 10). It urged states ‘to
harmonize their procedures’ not only concerning prosecutions, but also as
far as the legal, medical and psychological assistance to victims of trafficking
was concerned (paragraph 15), July 2001.