Critical Awareness

The House of Commons, the lower house and primary chamber of the U.K.’s parliament, is set to vote next week on a motion to declare the Chinese government’s actions in the Uyghur Region—which include systematic forced labor—a genocide. Collective decisions on genocide are uncommon but not unheard of in the U.K. parliament, which in 2016 declared that the Yazidis, an ethnic group in northern Iraq, had suffered genocide at the hands of the Islamic State. But because next week’s motion involves potentially accusing a fellow member of the U.N. Security Council, rather than a non-state terrorist group, the political and…

A new report by Council of Europe (CoE) anti-trafficking experts known as GRETA finds that the COVID-19 pandemic has made it easier for human traffickers to exploit people with few options while making it more difficult for trafficking victims and survivors to access justice and support. The Thomson Reuters Foundation reports, GRETA’s annual report noted an increase in sexual exploitation and traffickers going online to target victims – such as using gaming and social media sites to groom children. In Germany, a temporary closure of brothels in 2020 led to a rise in “hidden” prostitution marked by greater abuse, while…

Al Jazeera reports that Lebanon’s current financial crisis heightens the insecurity of domestic workers, particularly migrant domestic workers, as they are being paid a fraction of their time’s worth – if at all. All migrant workers are subject to the kafala system which binds employees to their employers and leaves them vulnerable to exploitative situations and modern slavery. Because of the extreme power imbalance in favor of employers, migrant domestic workers are vulnerable to being subjected to physical, emotional and sexual abuse, restrictions placed on their movements and having their wages withheld. In September 2020, the labor ministry established a…

This week, Labour Member of Parliament (MP) Diana Johnson sought support from her party for amendments to the U.K.’s controversial Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill that would criminalize sex workers’ clients, otherwise known as the Nordic Model. Some proponents of the Nordic Model, including Diana Johnson who tabled a bill in December calling for the criminalization of sex workers’ clients and third parties, take the position that sex work is inherently violent towards women and girls and equate sex work to trafficking. However, there is little evidence to suggest that criminalizing sex workers’ clients does anything to tackle sex…

A new report from the United Nations has revealed that laws allowing rapists to evade prosecution by marrying their victims persist around the world. According to the findings from the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), so-called “marry-your-rapist” laws still exist in Russia, Thailand, Venezuela and 17 other countries. In these countries, men can legally have rape convictions overturned if they marry their victims, effectively allowing forced marriage and modern slavery. Many of these countries restrict the law to cases involving underage victims, deferring to the victim’s parents or guardians for consent to marry and further undermining her agency. Though Dina Dabbous,…