More than 12 million people in the world are locked in a modern form of slavery, the International Labour Organisation said Wednesday as France marked its abolition of the practice more than 150 years ago.
The ILO estimated in a report last year that 12.3 million people were subject to forced labour. "For us that's contemporary slavery," Patrick Belser, an ILO expert explained. The ILO said in the report that globalisation was helping to fuel forced labour, especially in Europe.
Slavery was outlawed by an international convention in 1926 and technically it cannot exist today because no one can invoke a right of ownership over another human being. Forced labour was defined in a 1930 treaty as any form of involuntary work imposed under the threat of a sanction.
It is predominantly found in Asia, where 9.5 million people are thought to be engaged in forced labour, according to the ILO. The bulk of them are peasants in India and Pakistan who live in virtual serfdom as bonded labour.
They are condemned to a life of misery because they are forced to give half of their crop to their landowner, while their children are often obliged to work to pay back debts, according to the ILO. In Myanmar, an unknown number of people have been forcibly enrolled by the military junta to build roads, army camps or landmine clearance.
Another 1.3 million victims are in Latin America, followed by Africa (1.2 million) and industrialised nations (360,000). Some 55 percent are women and nearly half are children, Belser said. The ILO has warned that globalisation is helping to create other forms of coerced labour, partly due to human trafficking networks smuggling migrants into rich countries.
While prostitution accounts for an estimated two-thirds of the problem in Europe, forced labour is appearing in sectors of the economy like agriculture, or hotels and restaurants. The International Organisation for Migration believes that 700,000 to two million people pass through trafficking networks every year.