Slavery resources

The following briefings were supported by the Anti Trafficking Monitoring Group shared with parliamentarians to improve the Modern Slavery Bill going through the parliament.

• A briefing on the Independent Anti-Slavery Comissioner; to welcome a government amendment which allows the Commissioner to oversee victim support and assistance, but continue to call for the role to have greater independence from the government and more direct access to Parliament.
• A briefing on victim protection (Clause 49) to support an amendment to create a duty on the State to provide physical, psychological and social recovery to victims, and a separate amendment to provide for the statutory establishment of the National Referral Mechanism (NRM).
• A briefing to call for the inclusion of a separate child exploitation offence to address the potential prosecution gaps that may result from the existing offences.
• A briefing to welcome the government’s amendments to clause 48 which give child trafficking advocates full legal powers and to seek assurance from the Minister that the provision of  advocates will not be dependent on a positive NRM decision.
• A briefing in support of an amendment to reinstate protections for Overseas Domestic Workers (ODWs), to allow them to change employer, renew their visa and be entitled to a 3-month temporary visa to find an alternative place of (domestic) work if they leave an abusive employment situation.
• A briefing which calls for the statutory defence to be strengthened to ensure it works effectively for children, specifically by removing the ‘Reasonable Person Test’.
• A briefing in support of an amendment to Clause 47 to ensure that legal aid could be provided to a person before an application had been made to the National Referral Mechanism (NRM) competent authority or before the competent authority had reached its NRM decision.

RACE in Europe Project, lead by Anti-Slavery International.
This report analyses the phenomenon of trafficking into crime such as cannabis cultivation, ATM theft, pickpocketing, bag-snatching, counterfeit DVD selling, benefit fraud and forced sham marriage, as well as being forced to beg. The report explores the situation in the project partner countries (Ireland, the UK, the Czech Republic, and the Netherlands) and provides an overview of the rest of Europe. It exposes the dearth of systematic information and awareness about this type of exploitation amongst the policy makers and justice system actors with very few cases reported in official statistics and many victims misidentified as offenders.

Anti-Trafficking Monitoring Group.
The Anti-Trafficking Monitoring Group has created proposals for a revised National Referral Mechanism (NRM), one for adults and a separate one for children, to assist the Home Office in its ongoing review of the current system. The NRM is the process through which victims of trafficking are formally identified and supported and has been in place in the UK since 2009. After it was established, the ATMG has raised concerns about the way in which it operates and has highlighted these in its research reports. The proposed models address these issues and provide workable solutions to them.

Audrey Guichon, Anti-Slavery International.

New research looking at the vulnerabilities to widespread abuse of Nepalese migrant domestic workers in Lebanon rooted directly in the systems in place in both home and destination countries. It also looks at the work Anti-Slavery and its partners have done to reduce these vulnerabilities and the first signs of change.

Anti-Trafficking Monitoring Group.
Fourth report in the ATMG series analyses the UK’s response to trafficking four years on from the Council Of Europe anti-trafficking convention coming into force. Whilst there has been a number of improvement in the government’s response to trafficking through the National Referral Mechanism (NRM), the system fails to systematically identify, assist and protect victims of trafficking. The report highlights major problems of the UK’s system, especially looking at victims of trafficking through context of their immigration status, causing the decision making to be unfair and discriminatory.

Anti-Trafficking Monitoring Group
This report examines the effectiveness of the UK’s Criminal Justice System’s (CJS) response to trafficking in terms of law, policy and practice. The report found that, in spite of localised examples of good practice, the CJS fails to systematically prosecute traffickers and protect victims’ rights. Despite the Government’s claims to make the UK a “hostile environment” for traffickers, human trafficking is not a policing priority.

Anti-Trafficking Monitoring Group.
The new report from The Anti-Trafficking Monitoring Group is the result of research carried out between 2010 and 2011 with the aim of examining trafficking prevention in the UK in accordance with the Government’s obligations under the Council of Europe Convention on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings. In particular, it assesses measures instigated by the UK Government to prevent trafficking/re-trafficking, highlights good practice in prevention programming and offers recommendations to strengthen the UK’s ability to prevent trafficking in the future.

Sarah Edwards (with contribution from Rachel Annison).

‘Never Work Alone’ is a guide for trade unions and other civil society organisations to jointly combat modern-day slavery and trafficking of workers. The report is the result of a two-year project in which trade unions and NGOs have looked into each other’s actions and approaches to combat slavery and labour trafficking. It examines different approaches and shows four major common grounds for action, each of them documented with a series of best practices.

Anti-Slavery International, Paul Robson.

This report finds that trafficking of children to cocoa farms in Côte d’Ivoire still occurs. The research found significant numbers of young people in Mali and Burkina Faso who had worked as children in cocoa farms in Côte d’Ivoire in the last five years. The practices occur in the context of large-scale movements of people within the region including the trafficking of children to other agricultural activities and to other sectors.