Professor Janie Chuang Lectures on the Past 20 Years of Global Response on Human Trafficking
Professor of Law Janie Chuang gave the Jerome Hall Lecture at Indiana University Maurer School of Law. As one of the leading scholars on labor and human trafficking, her lecture provided an analysis of the success and failures of the United Nations protocol on human trafficking as well as the United States domestic anti-trafficking law and policy. She explained that the modern trafficking regime started with the adoption of the United Nations Protocol to Prevent, Suppress, and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Woman and Children, adopted by the General Assembly in 2000. As of February 2018, 173 states have ratified this treaty.
Professor Chuang began her lecture by analyzing the successes and failures of the first 10 years of both the Protocol’s adoption and the United States’ policy on the prevention of human trafficking. Her research into the protocol’s effectiveness focuses on the “3 P’s;” prosecution of traffickers, protection of trafficked persons, and the prevention of trafficking.
One issue of much debate throughout the history of anti-trafficking has been whether all sale of sex amounts to trafficking. The Bush Administration took a position equating the sale of sex with sex trafficking, seeking to prevent trafficking by promoting the abolition of prostitution or sex work writ large. It pursued this policy by requiring, for example, NGOs, governments, and other institutions to sign an anti-prostitution pledge as a condition of receiving certain streams of U.S. grant funding, including anti-trafficking funding and Global Aids Act monies. In protest, Brazil refused $40 million in HIV/AIDS prevention funding because they felt public health workers would lose access to the vulnerable population of sex workers. They believed that in order to have access to these populations they must be approached in a non-judgmental manner; the signing of the anti-prostitution pledge would signal their judgment towards this population, and thus diminish access to this population.
Professor Chuang also highlighted the failures of the decade in terms of labor trafficking. She displayed photos and evidence of labor trafficking right here in the United States, where a group of Indian immigrants under a work visa were found to be living in cramped conditions, with little or no pay and often owing their companies money for equipment being used on the job. The Department of Justice refused to prosecute this particular case, and continued to fail to do so in thousands of cases across the United States.
One of the ideas to combat labor trafficking came under the Obama Administration by rebranding labor trafficking into the term “modern slavery.” With this rebranding came the rebranding of those who have “taken up arms” against labor trafficking, calling themselves the “Modern Abolitionists” and forming groups called “Operation Underground Railroad,” whose mission is to expose and free those who are sex trafficked. Such “raid and rescue” techniques have drawn a great deal of criticism. At the same time, a growing awareness about trafficking is was noticed also in highly skilled labor, such as teachers and nurses.
She continued her lecture by highlighting the small, but important measures being taken to combat modern slavery. For example, some states have taken measures to disclose whether forced labor is being used anywhere in their supply chain, executive orders against labor trafficking, and other measures.
What are the next steps in global migration governance?
In 2018, the UN adopted the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (GCM) to help combat the increasingly apparent problem of modern slavery across the world. The Trump Administration has not adhered to this compact to date. Some of the potentially helpful steps for anti-trafficking covered in the compact are:
- Prohibit recruitment fees of workers
- Restrict employer-tying of visas
- Prohibit retaliatory termination and deportation of workers who complain about abusive working conditions.
Competing objectives of the GCM:
- Border control
- Access to flexible labor markets
- Migrant welfare
How can these objectives be balanced?
The International Organization for Migration, a related organization to the UN, has been tapped to mitigate the competing objectives of the GCM, which comes with its own positives and negatives, explained by Professor Chuang.
With the interests of the competing objectives in mind, Professor Chuang left the audience with the questions of how much exploitation are we willing to tolerate in the labor markets and for what goals. Her hope is that with this research and policy changes we can view human trafficking as an anomaly and not a feature of global labor markets.