Slavery resources

“One day at a time” looks at the experience of the Recovery Needs Assessment (RNA) process. It charters the first-hand experiences of, not only those on the receiving end of support, but also the experiences of Modern Slavery Victim Care Contract (MSVCC) support providers, along with, support workers outside of the MSVCC.

Research and analysis from the anti-trafficking sector has demonstrated the considerable shortcomings within the UK’s anti-trafficking framework, failing victims and survivors of trafficking.

The UK government has tended to view trafficking and modern slavery as a discrete form of abuse rather than existing at the extreme end of a continuum of exploitation. Working conditions must be improved generally to avoid situations degrading to the stage where they amount to human trafficking. Strengthening the labour market enforcement can help to embed a model based on proactive protection rather than simply redress once a situation has degraded to a sufficient level of severity.

This joint submission looks at the impacts of the UK’s immigration enforcement-centred approach, current obstacles in the identification and protection of victims of trafficking and modern slavery and provides a series of recommendations.

Migrant domestic workers in the UK, the majority of whom are women that live in their employer’s household, continue to suffer from widespread abuse and exploitation, including situations of trafficking and modern slavery

This is a joint submission by Anti-Slavery International, Focus on Labour Exploitation (FLEX), Kalayaan, Kanlungan Filipino Consortium, and the Voice of Domestic Workers. The submission focuses on abuse and exploitation, including trafficking and modern slavery, of migrant domestic workers in the UK.

The Overseas Domestic Worker visa increases vulnerability to exploitation because it restricts migrant domestic workers to a non-renewable six-month visa, against the recommendations of an independent review commissioned by the Government itself3. The inability to renew the visa renders the right to change employer inaccessible in practice and leaves migrant domestic workers to face abuse and exploitation with no escape route. It also obstructs access to justice and remedy when abuse occurs. New protections for migrant domestic workers announced by the Government in 2016 have either been dropped altogether or are not being implemented in practice.

A joint submission by Anti-Slavery International, SOS Esclaves, Temedt and Timidria for the UN Special Rapporteur on Slavery’s thematic report on slavery affecting persons belonging to ethnic, religious and linguistic minorities.

This provides evidence on descent-based slavery in Mauritania, Niger and Mali and pervasive discrimination against people considered of slave descent (or ‘slave-caste’) who are no longer under the direct control of their ‘master’.

A joint submission by Anti-Slavery International, Investor Alliance for Human Rights, Uyghur Human Rights Project, and World Uyghur Congress on systematic imposed forced labour in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (the Uyghur Region) targeting the Uyghur population and other Turkic and Muslim-majority peoples on the basis of their religion and ethnicity.

As an integral part of their workforce, in operations and supply chains, companies should take steps to make sure migrant workers’ rights are respected and upheld. This must include steps to improve access to effective remedy for migrant workers, including by understanding and addressing the underlying drivers of exploitation and barriers migrant workers face when seeking remedy. This report guides companies on how they can support migrant workers’ access to remedy.

A coalition of civil society organisations is calling for the introduction a new UK ‘mandatory human rights and environmental due diligence’ law, based on the duties to prevent tax evasion and bribery found in the Criminal Finances Act 2017 and the Bribery Act 2010 – as called for by the UK Parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights, and found to be legally feasible by the British Institute of International and Comparative Law.

These principles for a new law have been prepared by UK civil society organisations who are working to strengthen corporate accountability for human rights abuses, including modern slavery, and environmental damage. It provides an overview of the principle elements needed in such new legislation.

The principles are endorsed by over 30 individual UK organisations, including Anti-Slavery International.

Anti-Slavery International partnered with the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) to publish a report exposing the relationship between climate change, forced migration and modern slavery. The report finds that climate change heightens existing vulnerabilities of slavery and that there are three emerging pathways linking climate change, migration and modern slavery: sudden events in the aftermath of disasters, slow onset events/disasters, and slow onset events combined with conflict and forced displacement.

The European Commission will soon publish a proposal for an EU business and human rights law that would require companies operating in the EU to prevent and address human rights abuses and environmental damage in their global supply chains. This commitment to mandatory human rights and environmental due diligence could help tackle forced labour and child labour in supply chains around the world.

On 28 June 2021, we published new research, undertaken by the Rights Lab, University of Nottingham, to understand how the upcoming EU business and human rights law could affect workers’ human rights through two case studies: the leather industry in India, and the coffee industry in Brazil.