Slavery in The 21st Century

II. Debt Bondage
Debt Bondage, also known as debt slavery or bonded labour, is the pledge of a
person's services as security for the repayment for a debt or other obligation, where the
terms of the repayment are not clearly or reasonably stated, and the person who is
holding the debt and thus has some control over the laborer, does not intend to ever
admit that the debt has been repaid. The services required to repay the debt may be
undefined, and the services' duration may be undefined, thus allowing the person
supposedly owed the debt to demand services indefinitely. Debt bondage can be
passed on from generation to generation.
Currently, debt bondage is the most common
method of enslavement with an estimated 8.1
million people bonded to labor illegally as
cited by the International Labour Organization
in 2005. Debt bondage has been described
by the United Nations as a form of "modern
day slavery" and the Supplementary
Convention on the Abolition of Slavery seeks
to abolish the practice.
Though most countries in South Asia and
Sub-Saharan Africa are parties to the Convention, the practice is still prevalent primarily
in these regions. It is predicted that 84 to 88% of the bonded laborers in the world are in
South Asia. Lack of prosecution or insufficient punishment of this crime are the leading
causes of the practice as it exists at this scale today.
Definition
Overview
Though the Forced Labor Convention of 1930 by the International Labor Organization,
which included 187 parties, sought to bring organized attention to eradicating slavery
through forms of forced labor, formal opposition to debt bondage in particular came at
the Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery in 1956. The convention in
1956 defined debt bondage under Article 1, section (a):
"Debt bondage, that is to say, the status or condition arising from a pledge by a debtor
of his personal services or of those of a person under his control as security for a debt if
the value of those services as reasonably assessed is not applied towards the
liquidation of the debt or the length and nature of those services are not respectively
limited and defined;"
When a pledge to provide services to pay off debt is made by an individual, the
employer often illegally inflates interest rates at an unreasonable amount, making it
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