William Wilberforce, who paved the way for the abolition of the slave trade in Britain, found solace for his views in both the Old and New Testaments.
In a memorable speech delivered in the House of Commons in 1788, he explained the meaning of the Old Testament moral code regarding slavery by stressing how the Hebrews differentiated between trading in human flesh and possessing servants, who could not be sold like livestock, abused and worked to death. “God allowed them to take bondmen and bondwomen,” he said, “treating them, however, with kindness, remembering their own feelings when they were slaves in Egypt, and admitting them to the chief national privileges, to the circumcision, to the Passover, and other solemn feasts, and thus instructing them in the true religion. Besides this, the slaves were to be set free at the year of Jubilee, or every 50th year.”
Wilberforce would have been appalled that 183 years after the passage of the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 in England, we have today globally over 27 million men, women and children being held as slaves. According to A21, an organization committed to combating human trafficking, each year nearly two million children are exploited in the global sex trade. Moreover, every 30 seconds another person becomes a victim of human trafficking, while the average age someone first becomes a victim is 12 years old. Ninety-nine per cent of victims are not rescued, and, only one to two per cent of slave traders are ever convicted.
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The United Nations marks the International Day for the Abolition of Slavery every year on Dec. 2. One would imagine that 2014-15 UN General Assembly session would have passed a resolution condemning countries that practise the enslavement of humans by naming them, by appointing special rapporteurs to investigate all countries practising slavery, by passing specific resolutions condemning them and imposing Security Council sanctions designed to compel them to free all 27 million slaves.
There are, to be sure, generic resolutions regarding slavery, including at the UN’s Human Rights Council (UNHRC). The Thirteenth Session, Agenda Item 3, concerns “Promotion and protection of all human rights, civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights, including the right to development.” In May 2014, UNHRC appointed Urmila Bhoola as Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery, including its causes and consequences. Her report reads like a compendium of platitudes garlanded with an optimism without borders that would make Pollyanna look like a pessimist on the verge of suicide.
Not a single country is named. The reason: the worst offenders – the slave traders, child sex “recreational” tourism promoters and slave kidnappers – sit on the UNHRC.
The distinguished African human rights activist Bram Dah Abeid, president of the Initiative for the Resurgence of the Abolitionist Movement, wrote to four UN agencies, allegedly tasked with combating slavery – naming names long enough to fill the rest of this article – complaining that the UN won’t condemn countries such as Mauritania because the 57 member Organization of Islamic States along with their “non-aligned” allies in the UN simply would not allow it. It is indeed a farce that child sex slave importing countries, as sitting members of the UN Human Rights Council, pass judgment on veritable democracies.
While 27 million slaves, with no hope of being rescued, perish in the dungeons of modern slave traders, the 2014-2015 UN General Assembly Session passed not one resolution condemning any country where slavery is sanctioned and openly practised. (But it passed 20 resolutions against Israel and three on the rest of the world.)
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That the UN would be the repository of international legitimacy is the clearest manifestation of how an international body founded on the noblest aspirations of men has sunk into an abyss of unprecedented duplicity and cynicism. Such are the wages of multilateral fetishism.
In such a topsy-turvy world, Lewis Carroll’s Alice comes to mind:
“If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn’t. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn’t be. And what it wouldn’t be, it would. You see?”
Yes, we see.