Modern Slavery and the International Human Rights Regime

This chapter considers the intersections between the concepts of modern slavery and human rights. It first considers their conceptual complexity and how this affects their practical implementation. Second, it examines how the two concepts developed throughout history, emphasizing that a system aimed at eliminating the slave trade and, subsequently, slavery, has existed since the eighteenth century. Thus, the abolitionist ideal existed well before the affirmation of the modern concept of human rights, which, notwithstanding its multiple historical roots, certainly developed after the end of World War II. Finally, the chapter considers the present-day efforts of various global governance actors at multiple levels—universal, regional, and subregional—and the ways in which the modern slavery paradigm is advanced within, but on some occasions also outside, the international human rights regime.