In order to make these points a bit more meaningful, let me give some examples of cases of forced labour in the 1990's, including bonded labour, which Anti-Slavery international is trying to deal with at the moment. There is a common assumption that the various forms of slavery must be extremely rare today, but unfortunately nothing could be further from the truth. Traditional slavery occurring in Bahr al-Ghazel State in Sudan, where women and children abducted during violent militia raids have been forced to work in the communities responsible for their abduction. Bonded labour in South Asia, in countries including India, Nepal and Pakistan. More recently, another report for the Supreme Court has indicated that several thousand people working in the sugar industry in Maharashtra State, cutting sugar cane, are bonded.
Similar proportions appear to exist elsewhere in South Asia.
Slave labour or bonded labour in Brazil, where thousands of labourers who are recruited from their homes in the northeast and transported to work on isolated estates in the forest are kept captive and forced to work indefinitely. Forced labour in the laogai prison camps of the People's Republic of China, where the use of forced prisoner labour violates international conventions and prisoners are involved in making products both for export and for the domestic market. The exploitation of women migrant workers who are coerced into working in the sex industry, particularly here in the European Union, both by physical force, by debt bondage, by deception and other techniques. Cases involving the trafficking of such women migrants were recently condemned by a European Union ministerial meeting in the Hague at the end of April 1997. The exploitation of child labour, not just in cases of child bonded labour but also in other defined as servitude, for example when young children are obliged to work as live-in domestic servants or children engage in hazardous work.