To mark Human Rights Day, the PEC’s Director argues that it’s time to adopt a human rights-based approach to UK modern slavery policy. His blog is based on remarks made at today’s Westminster Legal Policy Forum event, Next Steps for Tackling Modern Slavery in the UK.
On this day in 1948 the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was signed.
The UN has designated 10th December as Human Rights Day, the day on which we remember each year Eleanor Roosevelt’s crucial insight that human rights are universal because they are about everyone’s fundamental need for security.
Modern slavery is a human rights issue and proper appreciation of the implications of this is crucial to how we think about modern slavery policy going forward.
Modern slavery is a human rights issue because it occurs when a person is being subjected to exploitation so severe that it takes away their personal autonomy and their dignity – fundamental human rights to which everyone is entitled.
The implications of this for the development of future policy on modern slavery just got bigger, because one of the most significant recent developments for this area of policy is that since the General Election in July this year we have a Government which is unequivocal in its commitment to international law, including the UK’s obligations under human rights treaties. Anyone in doubt about that should read the Prime Minister’s recent address to the UN General Assembly and the Attorney General’s Bingham Centre lecture, 'The Rule of Law in an Age of Populism'.
This is a fundamental and potentially transformative change in the modern slavery policy environment.
Modern slavery is the subject of many international legal obligations which are binding on the UK – from the Palermo Protocol, through the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) with its prohibition on slavery and servitude, to the European Convention Against Trafficking (ECAT) – the bespoke regional human rights treaty on modern slavery.
Having a Government that unequivocally wants to act compatibly with human rights law provides an opportunity for a fundamental reset: the time has come for a truly human rights-based approach to modern slavery policy.
That means we need to spell out clearly the many implications that such an approach has for the future of the UK’s modern slavery policy. They are legion, but this blog focuses on just six of the most immediate implications:
- Making immigration legislation human rights compatible
- Reforming the National Referral Mechanism (NRM)
- Focusing on prevention
- Improving legal enforcement
- Strengthening the legal duties on business to proactively address modern slavery in their supply chains
- Meaningful participation of survivors
1. Immigration legislation
First, a human rights-based approach means that the Government must repeal the provisions in recent immigration legislation which remove protections from victims of modern slavery and trafficking to which they are entitled under ECAT.
One of the most alarming trends revealed by recent figures is the dramatic fall in the number of people who are accessing the Salvation Army’s support services under the Victim Care Contract – a 22% fall in October 2024 compared to last year.
We know exactly why this is – it is because recent immigration legislation has made survivors of modern slavery fearful that if they come forward they will be removed from the UK.
This was predicted at the time the legislation went through Parliament and sure enough it has materialised.
Removing protections for victims of modern slavery is a straightforward breach of the UK’s obligations in ECAT.
One of the most urgent policy priorities is therefore to repeal the offending provisions in the legal framework and the Statutory Guidance giving effect to it and make the UK’s legal framework human rights compatible again. The PEC will soon be publishing a report spelling out the changes that need to be made to the legal and policy framework to bring it back into line with the requirements of human rights law.
Equally urgent, given the Government’s focus on removals, is ensuring that deportations following “crackdowns” on “illegal working” in places like car washes and nail bars are not exposing survivors of modern slavery to the risk of re-trafficking, but are carried out in accordance with the UK’s clear human rights obligations in both the ECHR and ECAT.
2. Reform the NRM
The UK’s NRM was once an example of international best practice in the identification of, and provision of support for, victims of modern slavery.
But the massive backlog in the NRM, and the amount of time it takes to get a conclusive grounds determination, exposes survivors of modern slavery to ongoing risks of exploitation and re-trafficking.
The Government’s announcement of 200 additional staff to work to clear the backlog is very welcome, but the system is in need of more fundamental reform to bring it into line with the UK’s clear human rights obligations to protect victims of trafficking.
NRM reform must be sufficiently ambitious to ensure that the UK is meeting those obligations of identification and support.
A focus on early identification, for example, requires a wide range of first responders in different settings, including health and education, to be trained to identify and refer victims early.
3. Focus on prevention
The UK’s human rights obligations require it to take a more preventative approach to modern slavery. They place a positive obligation on the State not only to identify and support actual victims, but to take effective action to protect potential victims from trafficking – that is, to prevent it from happening.
A truly preventative approach requires a new focus on vulnerabilities: what are the drivers of vulnerability to extreme exploitation?
And it demands a much more holistic approach (or a “systems” approach) to modern slavery - as we recently outlined in our policy report - recognising that many other policy areas are crucial to preventing modern slavery, such as housing, special educational needs and child poverty, and that policies in other areas like employment and immigration can make vulnerability to exploitation even worse.
4. Improve legal enforcement
Human rights law also imposes positive obligations on the UK to prosecute offenders.
The first step towards fulfilling this is having an adequate legal framework containing the necessary criminal offences.
The Modern Slavery Act 2015 (MSA) provides this and was world-leading at the time in bringing together in one statute the various offences which constitute modern slavery.
But in practice the prosecution rate for those offences is staggeringly low.
The number of potential modern slavery victims referred to the NRM in the last 12 months for which figures are available is about 17,000.
But the number of prosecutions and convictions in any one year is tiny by comparison.
The protection of the criminal law is therefore illusory. Modern slavery has not been effectively criminalised in the UK.
Policy needs, first, to understand why this is – is it about the adequacy of the legal framework or is it because there are serious obstacles to prosecution? – and it then needs to address the obstacles to more effective legal enforcement.
One very likely obstacle to prosecution is that survivors do not want to engage with the criminal justice system, for a variety of reasons. We need to understand better what those reasons are and devise policy responses to them – e. g. providing mote trauma-informed training to police and prosecutors, to encourage early identification and promote engagement with the criminal justice system.
5. Strengthen the legal duties on business
The Transparency in Supply Chains provisions in the MSA were ground-breaking at the time of their enactment.
But everyone now knows that they are hopelessly inadequate.
The evidence is absolutely clear. A voluntary approach is simply not enough. No one argues credibly to the contrary.
Recent years have seen significant developments elsewhere in the development of legal regimes which require businesses to show that they have taken due diligence to avoid human rights risks in their supply chains – most notably in the recent corporate sustainability due diligence directive in the EU.
Those more general human rights laws abroad have overtaken the UK’s bespoke modern slavery provision in section 54 of MSA.
Forced labour import bans have also been used elsewhere (e.g. the US and now the EU) as a policy response to the problem of modern slavery in supply chains.
As the House of Lords Committee on the Modern Slavery Act 2015 observed in its recent report, UK policy needs to catch up with these human rights-driven developments in policy elsewhere for the UK to have a plausible claim of being world-leading again in its policy response to modern slavery.
6. Meaningful participation of survivors
Finally, a human rights-based approach to modern slavery policy, centred on the dignity and need for security of the people who are vulnerable to exploitation, requires meaningful participation of survivors in the making of policies that affect them.
This needs to go beyond tokenistic consultation.
To be done properly, it requires the proactive creation of institutional structures for regular participation.
Like many organisations working on modern slavery, at the PEC, which is part of the University of Oxford and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, we take a human-centred approach, and therefore have a Lived Experience Advisory Panel which routinely takes part in the co-creation of research.
The Government needs to create similar structures to ensure that its policy making on modern slavery is also properly informed by meaningful engagement with people with lived experience of modern slavery.
That means creating a national Survivors Advisory Council, as advocated by the UK Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner, drawing on the considerable learning that now exists about how to meaningfully include survivor experience.
Conclusion
This blog gives a flavour of how a truly human rights-based approach to modern slavery policy in the UK would make a real practical difference in policy terms. It has selected just a few examples. There are many more.
Many desirable next steps in UK modern slavery policy can be grounded in the requirements of human rights law and are underpinned by detailed treaty provisions, court judgments or the granular recommendations of relevant human rights monitoring bodies like GRETA, the Council of Europe’s expert body which monitors compliance with ECAT.
On Human Rights Day, we should remember that a human rights-based approach lends greater legal and normative force to such policy proposals in the current policy making environment in which compliance with international law is one of the Government’s clearest priorities.
