The discussion will be preceded by a UNICEF supported press briefing at 5:00 PM for all members of the media.
Chaired by William Patey, former British Ambassador to Sudan.
Speakers
Chris Trott is FCO special adviser on the Sudans
Peter Martell has reported on South Sudan for more than a decade. He lived in Juba from 2009-2011 for the BBC, helped set up one of the South’s biggest radio stations, and was AFP’s East Africa deputy bureau chief from 2011-2016. He is now writing a book on the history of South Sudan.
Mawan Muortat is a South Sudan political analyst, with an interest in development, democracy and peace issues. He has lived in the UK since 1984, and has travelled back and forth to South Sudan since 2008.
Marianna Zaichykova is a researcher for UNICEF South Sudan
]]>“Sometimes they don’t even know where here is.”
In the build up to the Thomson Reuters Foundation Trust Women Conference, on Monday 27 October the Frontline Club hosted a debate on modern day slavery and human trafficking chaired by Prabha Kotiswaran, senior lecturer in Law at King’s College London and advisor to the ILO-DFID Anti-Trafficking Project.
Annie Kelly, a journalist working on The Guardian’s Modern-day Slavery in Focus Project, laid out some of the key drivers and structural causes behind human trafficking and slavery in the 21st century.
“We are very used to reporting on slavery as individual stories . . . but it is a $150 billion industry affecting, conservatively, 21 million people [ILO estimate] in all forms of modern slavery, forced labour and human trafficking,” she said.
It is through these chains of exploitation that people are driven into situations of vulnerability. Through very modern forms: debt bondage and forced labour slavery has become “the bedrock of society, which pervades every corner and every aspect of our lives. Every commodity you use, every component in your phone, every place you travel to will have some link to modern slavery”.
“What has affected me,” Kelly said, “is just how effective a business model modern slavery and trafficking is at the moment, [and how it has evolved] from a high-cost, slow recruitment model to a very lost-cost, fast recruitment business. You would struggle to find another business out there that would give you the same return on investment.”
Kelly compared it to the global arms and drugs trade, explaining that whereas those deliver a one-time use product, with human trafficking you can reuse someone over and over again.
Modern-day slavery isn't just an issue of criminal justice, it's about people and what we value @frontlineclub
— WeAreTearfund (@WeAreTearfund) October 27, 2014
Importantly, she stressed that modern exploitation is not just in the buying and selling of people.
“The visible shackles you had 300 years ago have been replaced by far more subtle and invisible forms, such as economic exploitation. . . . Debt is a huge driver of forced labour, trapping millions of people across the world who feel they are unable to leave the work place.”
Monique Villa, CEO of the Thomson Reuters Foundation, marked corruption as “the grease that moves everything” and spoke of the need for banks and NGOs to work together to implement ways of tracking and monitoring financial transactions to combat the internationalisation of the slave trade.
While the abolition of slavery in law was ultimately successful, Klara Skrivankova, from Anti-Slavery International, said that it had failed to solve the root problem – merely driving it underground. “While in most cases it is not the states who are the active organisers of slavery and forced labour . . . its now mainly private actors.”
“It’s a big business”, she said, but one which is able to exploit gaps in policy and corruption.
“In the UK we have laws against trafficking, we have laws against slavery and yet we still see every year thousands becoming victims of exploitation,” Skrivankova said. Yet despite deficiencies in the law the major problem still lies in perception: “People still think slavery is an issue of history.”
It is the daily consumption of goods and services which ensures a market reliant on the victims of modern slavery. “It is not something far away but something that touches our lives everyday.”
While emphasising the need for legislation and for governments to take the lead, Skrivankova also warned that the provisions within, for example, the UK Modern-Day Slavery Bill, failed to adequately protect victims, provide the support they need and would be unlikely to increase prosecutions.
Sam Whyte, head of policy and advocacy at UNICEF UK, was quick to highlight the importance within these draft legal provisions to protect victims and especially children.
What became apparent during the discussion was the enormous gap between the estimated 30 million slaves throughout the world and the 7,000 prosecutions that the US State Department says take place every year against traffickers.
“It is just extraordinary – the gap between problem and response,” said Kotiswaran. On one level is it’s a definitional issue: how these people, be they women who are sex trafficked, migrant domestic workers or children, are met with institutional apathy and states of denial.
Kelly and Villa challenged corporations to take the lead, either through legislative coercion or pressure from consumers, to perform a form of human rights due diligence and investigate supply chain exploitation, corrupt middle men, levels of debt bondage and third-party recruitment:
“Thirty years ago, most companies in the world started to outsource massively to the developing world without any knowledge of who was in the supply chain.”
Yet corporations are beginning to realise that when these supply chains are exposed “it can damage their brand in a matter of seconds”.
While agreeing with the need for corporations to prove that their supply chains are clean, Kelly countered that unless there is someone or some body holding people to account, the money being made by trafficking is just too high for any meaningful change to take place.
'Consumers need to be aware but it ultimately coming down to government and law' @frontlineclub #slavery
— Emma Moseley (@Emmam1507) October 27, 2014
For Skrivankova, the biggest block to change is a lack of political will:
“In the UK modern slavery is now a hot political topic. There are political points being scored on modern slavery but actually if you look in reality what is actually being done, how much money is being spend and how much difference a law will make the effect is minimal.”
Whether it is a lack of political will, an unwillingness of consumers to act, the inability or ineffectiveness of mass organisation or a general unawareness of the problem all agreed that the ultimate goal of eradicating slavery was achievable.
“It is an issue of shedding light . . . of informing,” said Villar. “The thing is – you have to open your eyes. Ultimately it is up to the consumer to ask the question. We can task the government to legislate but you get very quick actions by corporations and your can expect very big decisions by the consumers. Just think – 30 million, maybe 40 million is nothing compared to the dimension of humanity. The abolitionists 150 years ago could do it, so why can’t we?”
The Thomson Reuters Foundation Trust Women Conference takes place between 17th-19th November.
You can watch and listen to the event here:
, 10:00 AM – 5:00 PM
]]>By Millie Cartwright
Veteran war correspondent Martin Bell was at the Frontline Club last night to look back on his long career as a journalist and share some pearls of wisdom for aspiring foreign correspondents.
Bell, who later went on to become MP for Tatton, a UNICEF ambassador and prolific writer, was talking to former BBC executive Vin Ray for a Reflections event in association with the BBC College of Journalism about a 35-year career that took him to 102 countries.
Inspired to take up journalism after observing the press corps while serving in Cyprus with the Suffolk Regiment back in the 1960’s, Bell covered numerous wars including Vietnam, Bosnia and the troubles in Northern Ireland during his 30-year career.
Twice winner of the Royal Television Society’s TV journalist award, he got into the BBC with the help of an ex-girlfriends father: “You didn’t apply for jobs back then,” he said.
Three years later he was broadcasting from London and ended up ‘unintentionally’ covering the Vietnam War in 1967 after catching they eye of the BBC bosses for his coverage of the overthrow of Kwame Nkrumah the previous year.
His initial broadcasts were, in his own words, examples of “How not to do television news.”
His first clip, in black and white, showed a young Bell covering American operations in Vietnam where “You’ll see no Vietnamese from start to finish.” He still looks the other way while the clip is shown, hands over his eyes: “I imitated the voice of the officer class and eventually I found my own style. By 1972 I’d humanised myself; I was talking Vietnamese, going to refugee camps and had better connections in the government.”
Amongst his other assignments that included reporting the election of Ronald Reagan, Bell covered the conflict in Bosnia. Safety standards were less rigorous at that time and journalists only began wearing flak jackets in the summer of 1992; just weeks after Bell narrowly missed a sniper bullet. For him, Libya today is a sharp reminder of those days 15 years ago, where journalists once again are at risk.
“The real heroes of this business are people like Tim Hetherington, but they don’t get the recognition they deserve,” he said. “I’m glad I’m not doing it anymore.”
Bell expressed concerns that reliance on security advisers has had a negative impact on journalistic neutrality. He is also critical of the kind of reporting that developed, particularly during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, when journalists remained in hotels in green zones and be at a distance from the conflict. This has led him to be somewhat critical of reporting today as for him there is no alternative to being as close to the action as possible.
“I always made the habit of hanging out with the bad guys because you have to understand why it is that they are doing what they are,” he said.
As UNICEF ambassador Bell enjoys “going to places where they can’t send celebrities like Robbie Williams and David Beckham” and a greater level of access compared to his time as a journalist.
Bell closed with a reading of one of his poems that looked back on his career from his latest book, For Whom the Bell Tolls: Light and Dark Verse. The closing line read: ‘You may recall I made no bloody difference at all.’
Martin Bell’s Advice for Future Foreign Correspondents:
- Don’t ever go into a village where there are no people or chickens, it’s always a bad sign.
- Know when to stop talking; silence is an art
- Don’t be a hotel roof dish monkey
- On reporting a shocking story: have one striking image, that’s all people can take
- Don’t make yourself the centre of any story
- Tone of voice is key
- Make sure you don’t editorialise
- Find your own style; there isn’t one for everybody.