Opinion piece by Dr Aidan McQuade, OBE 

During the 2019 rainy season, I travelled with colleagues to the Irrawaddy Delta in Myanmar.

There we spent a week talking to families in five different communities. The men of the families worked in the country’s shrimp fisheries of the Gulf of Mottama. As they waited ashore for the weather to calm, they told us about the realities of their work. 

They were physically confined on the rafts for nine months of the year and had to work 16 hours every day during that time. 

We heard about the routine use of violence, including rumours of the murder of fishermen by supervisors and dangerous working conditions: thousands of fishermen on these rafts had been killed in Cyclone Nargis in 2008, and one fisherman told us of two colleagues who had been decapitated in accidents on the rafts. 

In the end, the paltry amounts of money they received meant that their families were permanently in debt, with few options to service that debt other than continued work on the fishing rafts. 

In summary, we concluded that the employment conditions of all of the raft fishers that we spoke to fitted the international definition of slavery.

As the work of Human Rights at Sea and others shows, the conditions in the Gulf of Motama are, tragically, typical of many other seafarers across the globe. The writer William McKeever found in the course of research into the shark-fishing industry that many commercial seamen involved are enslaved. 

 

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Irrawaddy Delta in Myanmar
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Irrawaddy Delta in Myanmar
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Irrawaddy Delta in Myanmar

Ian Urbina’s work exposing slavery and other human rights and environmental abuses at sea, much of it catalogued in his very fine book, The Outlaw Ocean, observes that “debt and distance” are powerful means by which to keep maritime workers captive. 

Urbina and McKeever also show that the relationships between human rights abuses, such as slavery, and planet-threatening environmental degradation are close. Boat captains who think nothing of disciplining crews with extreme violence also tend to think nothing of devastating the marine environment through, for example, bottom trawling or pollution. 

As the Human Rights at Sea’s Geneva Declaration states,

“Human rights are universal; they apply at sea, as they do on land.” 

But human trafficking at sea is facilitated because of a wholesale absence of the rule of law in these vast tracts of the globe. 

Labour inspection is negligible, particularly on fishing boats. 

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Aidan

Shipping companies can register vessels under flags of convenience from countries with little concern for the rights of the workers employed under those flags. 

Other countries tie the visas of seamen to specific employers, essentially licensing those employers to traffick their employees. Hence, on the lawless oceans of the world, captains and ship owners are able to get away with the continued exploitation of their enslaved crews, sometimes using extreme violence, including murder. 

But while the reasons that slavery persists on the world’s oceans and elsewhere are many and varied, they may be summed up simply: Slavery persists because those with the power to end it do not exercise that power. 

The 2014 Forced Labour Protocol established a process by which governments, businesses and trade unions should work together at national and regional levels to develop action plans to combat slavery. 

However, at the time of writing, only 59 countries have ratified it

A lot of the slowness to ratify, including in some of the most slavery-affected countries on earth, including the Philippines, many of whose seafarers are enslaved in maritime industries, is because there is little financing available to effect appropriate anti-trafficking measures, and because of a wholesale failure of development policymakers and practitioners to take slavery seriously as an issue of poverty. 

So, as this international law gains wider traction – and financing – it must also compel policymakers to craft action on the specific challenges that pose such considerable slavery risks for the world’s seafarers. 

Fortunately, for those who will meet this task, Human Rights at Sea’s Geneva Declaration provides a template for action.

About the Author: Dr. Aidan McQuade, OBE, is a Human Rights at Sea Board of Trustees Member, writer and independent human rights consultant. He was director of Anti-Slavery International from 2006 to 2017. Prior to that he worked extensively in development and humanitarian operations, including from 1996 to 2001 leading Oxfam GB’s emergency responses to the civil war in Angola. He holds a PhD from the University of Strathclyde, and is a recognised expert on forced labour and trafficking on which he regularly advises businesses, international and non-governmental organisations. He is the author of two books: a novel, The Undiscovered Country; and Ethical Leadership: moral decision-making under pressure.

Contact: Charlotte Rumbol, Communications Manager and Project Officer: charlotte.rumbol@humanrightsatsea.org

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NB: The views expressed in this op-ed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the charity.