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By and large the international agenda does not change very much
as far as issues of slavery and servitude are concerned. However,
this year there was a major change at the meeting of the Sub-Commission's
Working Group on Contemporary Forms of Slavery, with the participation
for the first time of representatives of non-governmental organisations
(NGOs) financed by the UN Trust Fund for Contemporary Forms of Slavery
to come to Geneva to present testimony to the Working Group. NGOs
from five different countries (Cambodia, India, Mongolia, Nigeria
and Russia) presented information about the situation in their respective
countries.
While it was apparent that much remained to be learned about the
practical side of arranging such visits to Geneva and to brief the
NGO participants, undoubtedly the information presented by these
NGO representatives allowed the five members of the Sub-Commission
who are on the Working Group to hear about situations of slavery
or servitude on which they would not otherwise have received information.
On the issue of potential improvements, there is evidently a need
to provide those coming to Geneva with more specific information
about the issues which the Working Group is addressing (or are within
its mandate to address). I want to support suggestions which have
already been made that in future the participants assisted by the
Trust Fund should be selected in order to allow all or most of those
selected to focus on just one or two particular issues.
On the whole the last few sessions of the Working Group have examined
a wide range of subjects without being able to follow through in
much detail or to come up with proposals for action by governments
or others: the possible exceptions are the issue of the commercial
sexual exploitation of children, which of course received substantial
attention elsewhere at the World Congress in Stockholm last year,
and the issue of "comfort women", which continues to generate a
significant debate each year.
Looking back at the work of the Working Group over the past ten
years or more, Anti-Slavery International feels that it has been
most productive when it has tackled specific issues in some detail
and worked them through to the point of producing a conclusion in
the form of a recommendation or programme or action. We feel this
focused approach could be encouraged by the Trust Fund and would
in turn be made possible if governments which have not made contributions
were to do so.
I want to bring your attention to some quite different benefits
which flowed from the participation of NGOs financed by the Trust
Fund. We were able last June to take important steps towards identifying
the sub-regional and international nature of the problem of trafficking
in children in West Africa as a result of the attendance at
the same session of the Working Group of NGO representatives from
two different countries in the sub-region, Togo and Nigeria. Both
had come to report on the findings of research projects about girls
who were being recruited to work, mainly as domestic workers, and
were being smuggled across frontiers to do so. This form of abuse
is not new, nor is it the first time that it has been identified.
What is novel is that it was because the UN Trust Fund had paid
for one of the NGOs to be present that it was possible to put two
and two together.
In this particular case there have also been recent reports by journalists
about trafficking of girls from country to country, and it is evidently
high time that inter-governmental organisations and governments
in the sub-region took action to protect the children concerned
from abuse. Children, often under the age of 10, are reported to
be being transported long distance to work for others, frequently
being smuggled across frontiers and exposed to great hazards while
in transit, yet alone when they start work and have no one to stand
up for them against abuse and exploitation by their employer. There
are certain areas which seem to be preferred by recruiters of household
maids, such as southeast Togo, and there are evidently richer areas
where the demand for child domestics or other child labour is high,
such as the Lagos area and oil-rich Gabon.
Is this slavery or a modern-day slave trade? Evidently the millions
of people who employ children as domestic servants in West or Central
Africa, along with many other regions of the world, do not think
it is wrong. Indeed, the practice of employing children as live-in
domestic servants, both teenagers and even younger children, is
condoned at high level, with senior officials engaging in the practice.
Nevertheless, an existing UN human rights instrument, the 1956 Supplementary
Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, the Slave Trade, and Institutions
and Practices Similar to Slavery, is clear (in Article 1.d) in condemning
cases of child labour when the children concerned are "delivered"
by their parents or guardian so that their labour can be exploited
by someone else . While virtually no government in the world is
taking action to prevent children from working as live-in domestic
servants, the potential to act against the long-distance trade in
children has been demonstrated already in one West African state,
Benin, where there are reports already that government action has
reduced the number of Beninois girls being taken abroad to work.
In the next few years we expect to see the International Labour
Organisation (ILO) giving a clear indication of what forms of child
labour are not acceptable. In the meantime, however, it seems important
that the UN's human rights mechanisms should be firmly condemning
all forms of recruitment of children which put their lives at risk.
The worst cases reported in West Africa recently involve children
being killed in transit and even drowned while crossing the sea
in leaky vessels. Clearly, such cases should be energetically condemned
and governments should be called upon to take action to end the
practice.
In conclusion, Anti-Slavery International would like to support
any efforts by the Working Group on Contemporary Forms of Slavery
to focus its attention at future sessions on particular issues,
in order to identify what needs to be done to end specific abuses.
Clearly it would be desirable to go further than at present in identifying
a number of such issues which need to be addressed over a period
of, say, three years in order to enable as much as possible to be
done to make the Working Group's discussions well informed and fruitful.
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