UN Business & Human Rights Forum 2019: Can Legislation Help Eradicate Modern Slavery?
Modern slavery is pervasive in global supply chains — more than 150 billion dollars of illicit profits are generated from the exploitation of an estimated 40.3 million people around the world. This means that modern slavery touches every part of the globe, and a vast number of the products and services that companies provide.
To illuminate what companies are reporting on this topic, Minderoo’s Walk Free initiative began the project Beyond Compliance: Modern Slavery Act Research in collaboration with WikiRate and more recently the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre. Born out of the introduction of the UK Modern Slavery Act in 2015, the research has involved over 1,000 student researchers, assessed 1,220 company statements and collected nearly 20,000 datapoints on issues such as legal compliance, risk assessment and remediation methods. All of the data collected is open and accessible through the WikiRate.org platform. Our most recent publication focusing on the UK hotel sector can be found here.
This year at the UN Business & Human Rights Forum in Geneva, WikiRate representative Laureen van Breen spoke on the panel, Transparency and Beyond: taking stock of legislative approaches to eradicating modern slavery in global supply chains, to share findings from the citizen-science approach taken to engage stakeholders in modern slavery research.
The UK legislation requires that companies with operations in the UK and an annual turnover of more than 36 million pounds produce a yearly statement detailing their efforts to combat modern slavery.
The theme of this year’s UN Business and Human Rights Forum was Time to act: Governments as catalysts for business respect for human rights. The theme evolved from one of the key takeaways from the Forum in 2018: that governments must step up their efforts and show leadership in protecting people from business-related human rights abuses.
The objective of the session was to engage civil society, governments and businesses in a discussion about the future of modern slavery legislation while taking stock of the lessons learned from the mandatory disclosure regimes in the UK and Australia (Australia has passed its own Modern Slavery Act in 2018) and ‘beyond transparency’ legislative approaches in Brazil and Hong Kong.
The session was devoted to a panel discussion with representatives from the UK, Australian and Brazilian governments alongside civil society and industry organizations. In the first half of the session reflecting on transparency legislation, Katherine Bryant of the Walk Free initiative moderated, with panelists Brad Armstrong, from the Australian Border Force, Emma Crates from the Office of the UK Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner, Catie Shavin of the Global Business Initiative on Human Rights, and Laureen van Breen from WikiRate.
Amol Mehra of the Freedom Fund moderated the second half, where panelists presented creative approaches to addressing the problems, beyond the mandatory reporting legislation being utilized in some countries.
Emma Crates started off by emphasizing the important role diverse stakeholders play in developing this kind of legislation, noting that oftentimes the pressure for these Acts comes from the public, not from the government.
Throughout the session, panelists and comments from the audience echoed the sentiment that the new legislations have been a learning process. Catie Shavin noted that they have helped to strengthen the case for people working in companies to drive change internally. She also remarked that the real change from this law is that it allows companies to focus on supply chain issues and collaboration with multi-stakeholder groups, and to put the necessary resources towards these efforts.
Reporting on the research developed for the Beyond Compliance assessment, Laureen van Breen shared the benefits of engaging the ‘crowd’ in contributing research.
We need to document the impact of legislative acts to be able to hold companies and governments accountable. Transparency is not the end goal, but the foundation for understanding and improving company behavior — Laureen van Breen, WikiRate Program Manager
To round off the first half of the session, Katherine Bryant asked how the legislation can be improved. Panelists voiced the need for collaboration and keeping the conversation open and consultative to all stakeholders. Companies should work together as well, given that supply chains are overlapping and big problems cannot be solved in silos. And finally, ongoing public accountability so that companies and investors are encouraged to continue to improve their due diligence and remediation efforts.
The second half of the session explored other approaches to tackling modern slavery in Brazil and Hong Kong. Panelist Dennis Kwok Member of the Hong Kong Legislative Council, discussed efforts to integrate reporting obligations for companies through the Hong Kong stock exchange, engaging the financial sector for support.
The presentation from Deputy Tulio Gadelha of the Brazilian Congress, outlined progress made through Brazil’s “dirty list” approach (naming-and-shaming companies found to be profiting from slave labor, and excluding them from public procurement tenders). In the context of Brazil’s current political climate, this elicited conversation around challenges faced by organizations working on the ground, given reduced political support.
The lively discussions throughout signalled that there is growing momentum among governments to utilize legislation alongside multi-stakeholder support to eliminate slavery. In the room it was palpable that a collaborative approach is necessary to address this global challenge.
As an open research partner, we will continue to support Walk Free and others in the development and scaling of modern slavery and transparency assessments.
A huge thank you to the students and professors of the Australian National University and WikiRate volunteers for their involvement in this project. If you are interested in collaborating on the Modern Slavery Act Project or have questions about our work, please get in touch at info@wikirate.org.
