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	Multilateralism and its constraints are under siege by Robert Malley President, International Crisis Group   Dec. 2018   In a world with fewer rules, the only truly effective one is knowing what you can get away with. The answer today, it turns out, is: quite a lot.   As the era of uncontested U.S. primacy fades, the international order has been thrown into turmoil. More leaders are tempted more often to test limits, jostle for power, and seek to bolster their influence or diminish that of their rivals by meddling in foreign conflicts. Multilateralism and its constraints are under siege, challenged by more transactional, zero-sum politics.   Instruments of collective action, such as the UN Security Council, are paralysed; those of collective accountability, including the International Criminal Court, are ignored and disparaged.   Nostalgia can be deceptive. Too fond a portrayal of the era of Western hegemony would be misleading. Iraq's chemical weapons use against Iran in the 1980s; the 1990s bloodletting in Bosnia, Rwanda, and Somalia; the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; Sri Lanka's brutal 2009 campaign against the Tamils; and the collapse of Libya and South Sudan: all these happened at a time of - in some cases because of - U.S. dominance and a reasonably coherent West. A liberal and nominally rules-based order hardly stopped those setting the rules from discarding them when they saw fit. The erosion of Western influence, in short, looks different from Moscow, Beijing, and the developing world than it does from Brussels, London, or Washington.   Still, for better and for worse, U.S. power and alliances have for years shaped international affairs, set limits, and structured regional orders. As the West's influence declines, accelerated by U.S. President Donald Trump's contempt for traditional allies and Europe's struggles with Brexit and nativism, leaders across the world are probing and prodding to see how far they can go.   In their domestic policies, many of those leaders embrace a noxious brew of nationalism and authoritarianism. The mix varies from place to place but typically entails rejection of international institutions and rules. There is little new in the critique of an unjust global order. But if once that critique tended to be rooted in international solidarity, today it stems chiefly from an inward-looking populism that celebrates narrow social and political identity, vilifies minorities and migrants, assails the rule of law and independence of the press, and elevates national sovereignty above all else.   Trump may be the most visible of the genre, but he is far from the most extreme. The wind is in the sails of strongmen worldwide. They realise, at times perhaps to their surprise, that constraints are crumbling, and the behaviour that results often fuels violence or crises.   Myanmar's mass expulsion of 700,000 Rohingya, the Syrian regime's brutal suppression of a popular uprising, the Cameroonian government's apparent determination to crush an Anglophone insurgency rather than tackle the grievances fuelling it, the Venezuelan government's economic warfare against its own people, and the silencing of dissent in Turkey, Egypt, and elsewhere are but a few examples. All are motivated in part by what leaders perceive as a yellow light where they used to see solid red.   Beyond their borders, these leaders test norms, too. Having annexed parts of Georgia and Crimea and stoked separatist violence in Ukraine's Donbas region, Russia is now throwing its weight around in the Sea of Azov, poisoning dissidents in the United Kingdom, and subverting Western democracies with cyberwarfare.   China obstructs freedom of navigation in the South China Sea and arbitrarily detains Canadian citizens - including the International Crisis Group's Michael Kovrig.   Saudi Arabia has pushed the envelope with the war in Yemen, the kidnapping of a Lebanese prime minister, and the gruesome murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi in its consulate in Istanbul. Iran plots attacks against dissidents on European soil. Israel feels emboldened to undermine ever more systematically the foundations of a possible two-state solution.   Such actions are hardly new or equal in magnitude. But they are more brazen and overt. They have this much in common: They start with the assumption that there will be few consequences for breaches of international norms.   The U.S. government has hardly been an innocent bystander. Trump's disdain for human rights and penchant for transactional diplomacy have set a strikingly negative tone. So too has his flouting of America's international commitments: tearing up the Iran nuclear deal and, worse, threatening to impose economic punishment on those who choose to abide by it; hinting he will leave the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty if U.S. demands are not met rather than working within it to press Russia to comply; and signalling, through attacks on the International Criminal Court and chest-thumping speeches about U.S. sovereignty, that Washington regards its actions and those of its friends as beyond accountability.   The danger of today's free-for-all goes beyond the violence already generated. The larger risk is of miscalculation.   Overreach by one leader convinced of his immunity may prompt an unexpected reaction by another; the ensuing tit for tat easily could escalate without the presence of a credible, willing outside power able to play the role of arbiter.   True, not everyone gets away with everything all the time. Bangladesh seemed poised to forcibly return some Rohingya refugees to Myanmar but stopped, almost certainly in response to international pressure. The feared Russian-backed reconquest of Idlib, the last rebel stronghold in Syria, has, for now, been averted, in no small measure due to Turkish, European, and U.S. objections. The same is true (again: for the time being) when it comes to a potential Saudi-led offensive on the Yemeni port of Hodeida, with Riyadh and Abu Dhabi largely deterred by warnings about the humanitarian impact and cost to their international standing.   Elsewhere, leaders anticipating impunity have been taken aback by the severity of the response: Russian President Vladimir Putin, for example, by the stiff sanctions and show of united resolve that Western powers have maintained since Moscow's annexation of Crimea and the killing of its former agent on British soil; Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman by the outrage that followed Khashoggi's murder.   Overall, though, it is hard to escape the sense that these are exceptions that prove the absence of rules.   The international order as we know it seems to be unravelling, with no clear sense of what will come in its wake. The danger may well lie less in the ultimate destination than in the process of getting there. As the following list of 10 Conflicts to Watch in 2019 amply illustrates, that road will be bumpy, and it will be perilous..   http://www.crisisgroup.org/crisiswatch http://www.crisisgroup.org/global/10-conflicts-watch-2020 http://www.crisisgroup.org/crisis-crunching-what-crisiswatch-says-about-todays-conflicts-and-tomorrows http://www.crisisgroup.org/latest-updates/our-journeys Visit the related web page
	Over 40 million people still victims of slavery by ILO, IOM, Walk Free, agencies   Sept. 2018-17   More than 40 million people are living in slavery. (ILO, Guardian News, agencies)   An estimated 40.3 million people were victims of modern slavery in 2016, a quarter of them children, according to new global slavery statistics released today.   The figures, from the UN's International Labour Organisation (ILO) and the Walk Free Foundation, show 24.9 million people across the world were trapped in forced labour and 15.4 million in forced marriage last year. Children account for 10 million of the overall 40.3m total.   The 2017 Estimates of Modern Slavery report calculates that of 24.9 million victims of forced labour, 16 million are thought to be in the private economy, 4.8 million in forced sexual exploitation and 4.1 million in state-sponsored forced labour including mandatory military conscription and agricultural work.   'What is startling about these new estimates is the sheer scale of the modern slave trade and the fact that we have 40 million people across the world in some form of modern slavery is simply not acceptable', said Fiona David, executive director of global research at the Walk Free Foundation.   'When you have 24.9 million people working under threat or coercion in farming, fishing and construction or in the sex industry and yet according to the United Nations only 63,000 victims of slavery were reported to the authorities last year, the gulf between the problem and the insufficient global response becomes very clear'.   The research also indicates that while many forced labourers reported violence or threat, the majority of them are exploited through debt bondage and non-payment of wages.   'We found that 50% of the 24.9m people in forced labour are in debt bondage, often arriving at a job with high recruitment debts to pay off or forced to take a job to pay off debt and with 7% of forced labourers saying their employers are forcing them to pay fines while at work', said Michaelle de Cock, senior statistician at the ILO.   'How forced labour affects the whole family is also very clear with 18% of male forced labourers surveyed saying that their employers directly threatened their families or children'.   The new global estimate also deals with forced marriage, the first time it has been included in any reporting of modern slavery figures.   'It isn't clear why forced marriage has often been overlooked as a form of slavery in data reporting', said David. 'If you have a situation where someone is sold into marriage and is providing free domestic labour and has no sexual autonomy, then when you take the label of marriage away from this situation it's often nothing less than slavery and we need to shine a light on this so that people can see it for what it is'.   According to the new global estimates, modern slavery is most prevalent in Africa, followed by Asia and the Pacific, although the ILO and Walk Free say that these results should be interpreted 'cautiously', due to a lack of available data from the Arab states and the Americas.   'We believe that the global estimate of 40.3 million is the most reliable data to date, although we believe it to be a conservative estimate as there were millions of people we couldn't reach in conflict zones or on the refugee trail and places where we couldn't be sure of collecting robust data such as the Gulf states, where access and language barriers prevented us from reaching the migrant worker communities', said de Cock.   Researchers found that more than 70% of the 4.8 million victims of sex trafficking were in the Asia and Pacific region, while forced marriage was found to be the most prevalent across African countries.   The global estimates were calculated by drawing on a range of data over a five-year period, including interviews with more than 71,000 people across 48 countries. The ILO and Walk Free Foundation also used figures from the UN's International Office for migration (IOM) and other UN agencies.   These figures are a marked increase from the ILO's previous estimates of 21 million people in forced labour worldwide.   The ILO and Walk Free attribute the rise to better reporting and research methodologies and the inclusion of forced marriage as a form of modern slavery.   The research was carried out as part of the drive to meet the sustainable development goal on slavery, which calls for the eradication of all forms of slavery, human trafficking and child labour.   http://www.iom.int/news/more-40-million-modern-slavery-152-million-child-labour-around-world http://news.un.org/en/story/2018/12/1027271 http://reliefweb.int/report/world/global-estimates-child-labour-results-and-trends-2012-2016 http://www.walkfreefoundation.org/ http://www.globalslaveryindex.org/2018/findings/executive-summary/ http://www.antislavery.org/official-forced-marriage-slavery/ http://bit.ly/2jFZRow http://www.freedomunited.org/advocate/forgirls/   Slavery is still a very real and widespread phenomenon, affecting more than 40 million people worldwide, says the International Labour Organization (ILO), with children making up a quarter of the victims , despite the entry into force of the landmark Forced Labour protocol in 2016.   The 2nd of December is designated the UN International Day for the Abolition of Slavery, which marks the adoption by the General Assembly of the United Nations Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others, which entered into force in 1951.   The day is an opportunity to raise awareness of this global issue, and focus on the eradication of contemporary forms of slavery, such as human trafficking, sexual exploitation, the worst forms of child labour, forced marriage, and the forced recruitment of children for use in armed conflict.   Most child labour that occurs today is for economic exploitation, contrary to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which recognizes 'the right of the child to be protected from economic exploitation and from performing any work that is likely to be hazardous or to interfere with the child's education, or to be harmful to the child's health or physical, mental, spiritual, moral or social development'.   Human trafficking is also explicitly prohibited by the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons Especially Women and Children, adopted by the General Assembly in 2000, which defines trafficking as the 'recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion for the purpose of exploitation'.   The ILO leads an ongoing campaign, along with its partners, to convince 50 countries to ratify the legally-binding Forced Labour Protocol, called 50 for freedom, where members of the public are encouraged to add their names to help reach the target: to date 27 countries have ratified the protocol.   Global Estimates of Modern Slavery 2017:   An estimated 40.3 million people are in modern slavery, including 24.9 million in forced labour and 15.4 million in forced marriage.   It means there are 5.4 victims of modern slavery for every 1,000 people in the world. 1 in 4 victims of modern slavery are children.   Out of the 24.9 million people trapped in forced labour, 16 million people are exploited in the private sector such as domestic work, construction or agriculture; 4.8 million persons in forced sexual exploitation, and 4 million persons in forced labour imposed by state authorities.   Women and girls are disproportionately affected by forced labour, accounting for 99% of victims in the commercial sex industry, and 58% in other sectors.   http://www.alliance87.org/ http://www.ilo.org/global/topics/forced-labour/lang--en/index.htm http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/Endingtodaysslavery.aspx http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Slavery/SRSlavery/Pages/SRSlaveryIndex.aspx http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Trafficking/Pages/TraffickingIndex.aspx http://gaatw.org/ATR/AntiTraffickingReview_issue15.pdf http://www.antitraffickingreview.org/index.php/atrjournal/issue/archive http://www.antislavery.org/official-forced-marriage-slavery/ http://www.ipsnews.net/2019/02/modern-day-slavery-rated-worlds-largest-single-crime-industry/   * Voices of Trafficking Victims: http://bit.ly/3rKO7QZ Visit the related web page
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