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Slavery

My Lords, on 19 June 1816 William Wilberforce made a telling contribution to parliamentary debate."““They charge me with fanaticism,””" he said."““If to be feelingly alive to the sufferings of my fellow creatures is to be a fanatic, I am one of the most incurable fanatics ever permitted to be at large.””" I very much welcome this debate, especially if it contributes to bringing this House, the Government and all of us to the point of being more feelingly alive to the sufferings of our fellow creatures. I suppose a wise Bishop speaks with some humility on this issue. Christians have been involved in the slave trade and in slave ownership, although of course eventually they were at the forefront of the abolition movement. Churches as institutions benefited from the proceeds of the trade. Indeed, the initial Christian response to the horrors of transporting, trading and owning slaves was to ameliorate the abuses rather than to abolish the system. Today’s debate offers us an opportunity to remind ourselves of the wide range of human rights abuses and violations that continue in our day, and about which we have already heard. In addition to traditional slavery and the slave trade, and bearing in mind the distinctions in terminology developed by the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, these abuses include, as we have heard, the sale of children, child prostitution, child pornography, the exploitation of child labour, the sexual mutilation of female children, the use of children in armed conflicts, debt bondage, the traffic in persons and the sale of human organs, among other things. I want to draw attention in particular to two forms of abuse that might particularly concern us. First, among the vast, continuing and widespread practices we might legitimately categorise as slavery are the 100   million or so children exploited for their labour, according to a recent estimate by the International Labour Organisation. We know that child labour is in great demand because it is cheap and because children are naturally more docile and easier to discipline than adults, and nearly always too frightened to complain. At the extreme fringe, children are kidnapped, held in remote camps and chained at night to prevent escape. Often they are put to work on road building and stone quarrying. These practices damage their health for life, deprive them of education and, worst of all, steals their childhood from them. As we have heard, NGOs have for some time proposed international timetables for the wiping out of the worst forms of child exploitation. They have recommended the immediate elimination of forced labour camps, and that children be excluded from the most hazardous forms of work, as defined by the World Health Organisation. I hope that today’s debate will encourage the Government to monitor progress on these recommendations. Secondly, I want to draw attention to the plight of rural migrant workers, which came to prominence with the tragic deaths of the cockle pickers in Morecambe Bay in 2004. It has been suggested that the living and working conditions of some 60,000 seasonal migrant workers in this country are tantamount to modern-day slavery, and need to be challenged by those with a concern for equality and human rights. In spite of the Gangmasters Licensing Act, migrant workers continue to face opposition from settled communities, who are wary of their numbers and fearful of the assumed economic and social pressures they place on towns and villages. Your Lordships will be interested to know that the Churches Rural Group, a co-ordinating group of Churches Together in England, works with these people to provide advice, information and legal assistance. It also encourages Churches and other bodies to be intermediaries in the disputes between misunderstood migrant workers and local residents. There are countless other abuses it would be possible to highlight, and to which, I have no doubt, others will draw attention. This debate draws our attention to the clear truth that slavery is indeed unfinished business, and that much more is needed to be done, not least in the G8, if we are to eliminate contemporary forms of exploitation. It is vital that we do this, because today’s debate touches on our most fundamental understandings of what makes for human dignity and value. To that end, as we have heard, the Churches and Church-related groups, societies and organisations are uniting under the banner ““Act to End Slavery””, to highlight the relevance of the bicentenary of the 1807 abolition by the Slave Trade Act to today’s world. I very much hope that this debate will make an effective contribution to that process.