FRANCAISAnti-Slavery International - Comments
1) The Mission
-Described as the world’s oldest human rights organisation, ASI claims a direct descent from the BFASS and keeps some of its archives. Nevertheless it has lost a lot of influence since the end of the nineteenth century, when it dominated the international human rights scene. Rivalled by a multitude of more generally scoped organisations, the foremost of which is Amnesty International, the Society encounters difficulties to convince the public that slavery is a modern issue, and not a problem of the past. According to ASI, slavery is specific, different from other human rights violations. A slave is: forced to work through physical or mental threat; owned by an ‘employer’ who controls his freedom of movement; treated as a ‘commodity’ or ‘property’, which deprives him of his human dignity. Other than the traditional forms of the slave trade, that is to say buying and selling human beings, the organisation distinguishes several types of modern slavery, i.e. bonded and forced labour; pawning; commercial and sexual exploitation of children; trafficking; early and forced marriages as well as illegal exploitation of child labour outside the family…
