Over the past decade, scholars, activists, and policymakers have repeatedly called for an examination of the role of technology as a contributing force to human trafficking and exploitation. Attention has focused on a range of issues from adult services websites and the use of social media to recruit victims and facilitate trafficking to the utilisation of data analytics software to understand trafficking and identify ‘hotspots of risk’. The new issue of Anti-Trafficking Review explores some of the assumptions about the role of technology in facilitating or preventing human trafficking and exploitation and the currently available technological tools that purport to address them. It concludes that the factors that enable and sustain human trafficking, such as lack of decent jobs and social protections, or inhumane labour migration regimes, require political will – not tech solutionist fixes.
International travelers wait in line before meeting with U.S. Customs and Border Protection Office of Field Operations officers at the airport amid the coronavirus pandemic. Via Wikimedia Commons
The Covid-19 pandemic presents a grave threat to public health, but emergency measures adopted to combat the dangers can also have discriminatory impacts and harmful effects, and can be extended and repurposed after a crisis has passed. Freedom House calls on governments to protect civil and political rights during and after the pandemic by following these principles:
Committee on the elimination of discrimination against women
The Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) is the body of independent experts that monitors implementation of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women.
CEDAW Committee consists of 23 experts on women’s rights from around the world.
More about the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women...
Direct Link to Full 7-Page 2020 IRC Publication:
https://www.rescue-uk.org/sites/default/files/document/2173/missingwomen-3920.pdf
The Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights, Dunja Mijatović, published today her annual activity report covering 2019. The report provides an overall picture of the main problems, challenges and opportunities that European countries are facing in the field of human rights. “The image I get from my work is of a Europe circling a roundabout, uncertain about its direction and the human rights obligations which member states voluntarily agreed upon,” says the Commissioner, adding that the current COVID-19 pandemic is exacerbating long-standing problems and emphasising the weaknesses of Europe’s human rights protection system.
The Commissioner observes that in 2019 as in previous years, there have been growing challenges to human rights standards and principles all over the continent. In some cases, hostility to human rights as universal, indivisible and legally binding has increased, fuelling a corrosive narrative that endangers the principles and standards on which Europe has been built over the past seven decades.
