About the project
The abolition of slavery stands out historically as a turning point against forced labour, and the ILO adopted the Forced Labour Convention nearly one hundred years ago, in 1930. As Crane et al. writes, this “would seemingly make forced labour a story of effective state governance ... Yet its re-emergence in the contemporary period elucidates a crucial governance gap in the industrialized world, and points to the failure of existing public and private governance initiatives.”
The ILO, Walk Free Foundation, and the IOM estimates that 27.6 million people were working under conditions of forced labour on any given day in 2021. A spike from the previous report in 2017. A new wave of regulatory frameworks is being passed domestically and regionally to hold companies accountable for adverse harms. Examples include the Norwegian Transparency Act and the EU Forced Labour Import Ban. Can these succeed where international norms and private regulation have failed to eradicate forced labour?
Supervisors:
Jakob Elster and Beate Sjåfjell
Program
- Victoria Skeie - presentation, 30 minutes
- Assessor, Prof. Tonia Novitz - commentary, 30 minutes
- Open discussion, 30 minutes
- Closed discussion, 30 minutes