Labour Exploitation in Human Trafficking Law

The 2000 Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons Especially Women and Children, supplementing the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime provides the first internationally agreed definition of the human trafficking. However, in failings to clarify the exact scope and meaning of exploitation, it has created an ambiguity as to what constitutes exploitation of labour in criminal law. <br>The international definition's preference for an enumerative approach has been replicated in most regional and domestic legal instruments, making it difficult to draw the line between exploitation in terms of violations of labour rights and extreme forms of exploitation such as those listed in the Protocol. <br><br>This book addresses this legal gap by seeking to conceptualise labour exploitation in criminal law.

DATA NECROPOLITICS v2

Algorithmic Governmentality’ (A. Rouvroy), ‘Expository society’ (B. Harcourt), ‘Black Box Society’ (F. Pasquale), ‘Surveillance Capitalism’ (S. Zuboff), ‘Techno-Feudalism’ (C. Durand), ‘Radical Anti-Humanism (E. Sadin), increasing literature has been highlighting how our societies and subjectivities are being modified and threatened by new technologies and Big Techs . While these debates are grasping how our social existence and future are being shaped by the development of novel technologies, guided by profit rentability and power struggles, I would like to suggest another critical layer. The current deployment of new technologies also relies on a novel circulation of violence. Borrowing the expression from Achille Mbembe I call this phenomenon Data Necropolitics, which is also the title of the book I am working on. Necropolitics is ‘the generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies and populations.’ My intuition is that Data Necropolitics is at the intersection of these two phenomena. Data and new technologies are reifying human’s lives, through different procedures of ‘mortification of the self’ labour exploitation , and in some cases, and especially among vulnerable populations, they can foster violence and eventually death. Violence should not be understood as ‘mere’ physical aggression or violation of private property rights. It is also socio-economic and symbolic. When I refer to Data Necropolitics, I have in mind not only the physical elimination of given individuals, but also a predatory/digital form of governance that expose and produce social violence, vulnerability and eventually (social) death. It circulates below and set the foundations of our technological ‘welfare’.

Practitioner's Insights – The Importance of Strategic Litigation to Fight Human Trafficking and (Labour) Exploitation

This article calls for an increased use of strategic litigation in the anti-trafficking field to ensure long-lasting systemic reforms. While generally, the prosecution of human trafficking or related severe forms of labour exploitation, like forced labour, is quite challenging and prosecutions and convictions lag seriously behind, it is argued that strategic litigation, meaning continuing legal action, aimed at achieving rights-related changes in law, policy, practice, and/or public awareness, can help to ensure that justice is delivered to victims, as several landmark cases also show. Efforts to counter human trafficking through strategic litigation by NGOs remain in their infancy, among others as they are resource-intensive and require access to experienced lawyers in high level courts. The author discusses some examples and dilemmas and identifies needs for NGOs to use strategic litigation more often as an effective tool to effectuate systemic change.