This is a world of compensations; and he who would be no slave, must consent to have no slave.
Abraham Lincoln
The function of freedom is to free someone else.
Toni Morrison
Forced labour occurs where work or service is exacted by the State or by individuals who have the will and power to threaten workers with severe deprivations, such as withholding food or land or wages, physical violence or sexual abuse, restricting peoples’ movements or locking them up. In 1930 the ILO adopted the Forced Labour Convention, which prohibits all forms of forced or compulsory labour. Exceptions are provided only in a few select cases, such as normal civic obligations or as a consequence of a conviction in a court of law. The convention also requires that the illegal extraction of forced or compulsory labour be punishable as a penal offence, and that ratifying states ensure that the penalties imposed by law are adequate and strictly enforced.
Convention No. 29 has been ratified by 177 countries to date.
Today, 81 years after Convention No. 29 officially entered into force, there are still an estimated 21 million women, men and children trapped in slavery all over the world. Last year the ILO teamed up with prominent artists, athletes and advocates to launch the End Slavery Now campaign. Read more about how you can get involved.
International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade, 25 March
No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck.
Frederick Douglass
This year’s theme, “Forever Free: Celebrating Emancipation,” pays tribute to the more than 15 million men, women and children who were victims of the transatlantic slave trade.
Many key anniversaries are marked in 2013, including 220 years since France’s General Emancipation decree liberated all slaves in present-day Haiti; 180 years since the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 ended slavery in Canada, the British West Indies and the Cape of Good Hope; and 170 years ago, the Indian Slavery Act of 1843 was signed. Slavery was also abolished 165 years ago in France; 160 years ago in Argentina; 150 years ago in the Dutch colonies; and 125 years ago in Brazil.
This year also marks the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation in the United States, which declared on 1 January 1863 that “all persons held as slaves within any States, or designated part of the State, the people whereof shall be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.”
