(C) OpenDemocracy
This story was originally published by OpenDemocracy and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
Labour rights won’t make criminal gangs go away [1]
[]
Date: 2025-05
The Beyond Trafficking and Slavery (BTS) project on openDemocracy has been documenting and directing discourse around the counter-trafficking and anti-slavery movement for a decade. During that time, it helped bring about several key changes to the field.
These include: moving the discussion beyond criminal justice to focus attention on the structural issues underpinning human exploitation. Shifting perceptions of trafficked people from passive victims of fate to active survivors shaping their own stories. And modernising conceptions of ‘slavery’ to capture the systems exploiting those downstream for the profit of those upstream.
These are all important achievements. Stakeholders are right to celebrate the widening of the conversation to also focus on labour rights. But there is a risk of the pendulum swinging too far in this direction, if BTS is suggesting that criminal justice is never the right response to trafficking.
This sort of absolutism is as unhelpful as the absolutism of those who insist criminal justice is the only effective response to human trafficking. It’s worth remembering that the criminal approach, enacted into international law 25 years ago, achieved wins that more than a century’s worth of anti-slavery legislation and decades of human rights activism had not. It’s also worth remembering that labour rights are a poor solution for work that shouldn’t exist in the first place.
Criminal justice and labour rights are powerful, complementary frameworks for addressing exploitation. Alone they are only ever partial solutions. Together they can fill each other’s gaps.
The success of criminal justice
The criminal justice response is set out in the Trafficking in Persons Protocol supplementing the Transnational Convention against Organized Crime.
By focusing on crime rather than rights, vastly different countries could gather around the same table to draft the protocol. The pragmatic compromises reached during the negotiation process resulted in treaties that have been almost universally ratified (most recently by Somalia in March of 2025), with common prevention, prosecution and protection objectives reflected in regional and national responses.
Most countries have enacted trafficking-specific laws that broadly align with the international definition. This harmonised understanding has meant that what was unheard of before has now permeated public consciousness.
It has also sensitised police to the possibility that the people they encounter may be victims of trafficking, with protection and assistance entitlements flowing from that status. Identification systems have been established in many countries alongside assistance and protection infrastructure, with compensation available to trafficked persons as victims of serious crime.
On the basis of this framework, multi-disciplinary counter-trafficking bodies, policies and plans of action have been established as well. While conviction rates are uneven across regions, they are generally increasing.
Some prosecutions have even been achieved through international cooperation, which would not have happened without consensus on the need for a global criminal justice approach. Had labour rights fully captured the issue, Interpol and Europol would not be involved in dismantling transnational trafficking networks, as they are today.
The architects of this international framework could not have anticipated the scale of trafficking that confronts us today, nor the shifting flows that have turned origin countries into key destinations for victims of trafficking. These changes underscore that the criminal justice approach remains fit for purpose.
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/beyond-trafficking-and-slavery/labour-rights-wont-make-criminal-gangs-go-away/
Published and (C) by OpenDemocracy
Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-ND 4.0.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/opendemocracy/
