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This chapter is about child labour as slavery in modern and modernizing societies in an era of rapid globalization.

For the most part, child slavery in modern societies is hidden from view and cloaked in social customs, this being convenient for economic exploitation purposes.

The aim of this chapter is to bring children's ‘modern slavery’ out of the shadows, and thereby to help clarify and shape relevant social discourse and theory, social policies and practices, slavery-related legislation and instruments at all levels, and above all children's everyday lives, relationships and experiences.

The main focus is on issues surrounding (i) the concept of ‘slavery’; (ii) the types of slavery in the world today; (iii) and ‘child labour’ as a type, or basis, of slavery.

There is an in-depth examination of the implications of the notion of ‘slavery’ within international law for child labour, and especially that performed through schooling.

According to one influential approach, ‘slavery’ is a state marked by the loss of free will where a person is forced through violence or the threat of violence to give up the ability to sell freely his or her own labour power. If so, then hundreds of millions of children in modern and modernizing societies qualify as slaves by virtue of the labour they are forced – compulsorily and statutorily required – to perform within schools, whereby they, their labour and their labour power are controlled and exploited for economic purposes.

Under globalization, such enslavement has almost reached global saturation point.

Trafficking¹ in human beings is gross.² It constitutes one of the most egregious violations of human rights.³ The vile nature of human trafficking is also hinged on the fact that it commodifies human beings. Hence its categorisation is modern slavery.⁴ So much of trafficking activities follow the pathways5 of other transnational forms of organised crimes and irregular cross-border movement of people.6 In response to this egregious crime, several international, regional and country laws and instruments have been used or proposed for combatting human trafficking.7 These instruments forbid trafficking in human persons and provide several preventive measures, prosecution of perpetrators and protection of victims of human trafficking.8 The number of state parties to the United Nations Protocol to prevent suppress and punish trafficking in persons, especially women and children, supplementing the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime (the Palermo Protocol), demonstrates the global commitment to combatting human trafficking. However, the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on legal systems, and the capacity of both state and private institutions to combat human trafficking, has added a knotty twist to the global problem of human trafficking. This essay looks at the trends of human trafficking in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. It also highlights international law and policy approaches that state parties and civil society organisations should adopt to counteract the changes and sustain the fight against human trafficking. Thus, the essay contributes to updating the legal and policy approaches to combat human trafficking in this era.

Despite the fact that the rights of the child began to be discussed in the nineteenth century, they came to the fore after the world wars in the twentieth century. Children, who were considered to belong to their fathers during the agricultural capitalism period before the Industrial Revolution, were also used for domestic labour. Children began to break away from their homes with the Industrial Revolution, after this long period of almost no rights. During this period, child labour, which is cheaper than adult labour and seen as the lever of capitalist accumulation, has become an important part of production. In the second half of the nineteenth century, through the 1920s, called the ‘child rescue age’, compulsory education came to the fore as a way of disciplining children. The perception that children are a group that needs to be protected as a separate category and not as a property reveals the necessity to regulate their working conditions and to ensure their rights. In this regard, the Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child realised the first real progress in 1924. Then, after the Second World War, which brought children's rights to almost a halt, the Declaration of Rights of the Child was signed in 1959. Both of the declarations rely heavily on protection and care services. The touchstone of the development of child rights is the Convention on the Rights of the Child, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 20 November 1989. The Convention became the human rights convention that was approved by the largest number of countries ever. It is the only human rights convention that uniquely combines civil, political, social, cultural, and human rights. Despite all these developments, children continue not to be regarded as subjects and to be exploited in the production of surplus value as the reserve army of labour.

This paper explores the health rights of prisoners as defined in international law, and the mechanisms that have been used to ensure the rights of persons in detention to realise the highest attainable standard of health. It examines this right as articulated within United Nations and regional human rights treaties, non‐binding or so‐called soft law instruments from international organisations and the jurisprudence of international human rights bodies. It explores the use of economic, social and cultural rights mechanisms, and those within civil and political rights, as they engage the right to health of prisoners, and identifies the minimum legal obligations of governments in order to remain compliant with human rights norms as defined within the international case law. In addressing these issues, this article adopts a holistic approach to the definition of the highest attainable standard of health. This includes a consideration of adequate standards of general medical care, including preventative health and mental health services. It also examines the question of environmental health, and those poor conditions of detention that may exacerbate health decline, disease transmission, mental illness or death. The paper examines the approach to prison health of the United Nations human rights system and its various monitoring bodies, as well as the regional human rights systems in Europe, Africa and the Americas. Based upon this analysis, the paper draws conclusions on the current fulfilment of the right to health of prisoners on an international scale, and proposes expanded mechanisms under the UN Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment to monitor and promote the health rights of prisoners at the international and domestic levels.

The object of this research is the reconstruction of the existing legal response by European Union states to the phenomenon of immigration. It seeks to analyse the process of conferral of protection.

One main dimension is selected and discussed: the case law of the national courts. The study focuses on the legal status of immigrants resulting from the intervention of these national courts.

The research shows that although the courts have conferred an increasing protection on immigrants, this has not challenged the fundamental principle of the sovereignty of the states to decide, according to their discretionary prerogatives, which immigrants are allowed to enter and stay in their territories. Notwithstanding the differences in the general constitutional and legal structures, the research also shows that the courts of the three countries considered – France, Germany and Spain – have progressively moved towards converging solutions in protecting immigrants.

The research contributes to a better understanding of the different legal orders analysed.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the experiences of Australian managers in relation to human rights issues and corporate responsibility inherent in their international business operations.

The paper reports findings from a qualitative research study; data were gathered from 70 face‐to‐face interviews with managers in the mining, textile and information technology industries who conducted international operations. The research method used was the critical incident technique, allowing interviewees to recall their observations and anecdotes in dealing with their perceived ethical dilemmas when operating offshore.

Human rights issues represented a serious dilemma for the Australian managers participating in this research. Findings in this study suggest that such issues, and resultant perceived dilemmas around their management, included child labour, hazardous working conditions, discrimination and exploitation of workers. The issues present self‐reported major dilemmas for managers as they challenge human rights concepts that underline their own ethical values in relation to the treatment of others in work environments. Respondents in this study report perceived limitations in dealing with cross‐cultural ethical issues, driven by economic and social reliance on such practices by their international business counterparts.

Understanding the nature of problems faced by Australian business managers in confronting perceived breaches of human rights may assist private and public sector organisations, both inside and outside of Australia, working in international environments. The paper reports insights and solutions offered by respondents encountering global human rights issues in the business context.

Purpose – This chapter investigates the possibilities and limits for effectuating the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) in Latin American countries.

Methods – The following dimensions are questioned: (a) the monitoring process of the CRC; (b) the contrast between the social organization of children's rights in the National State and the international pressures to incorporate foreign law into the national legislation; (c) the role of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in the processes of child rights violations.

Findings – The main conclusion is that the possibilities of effectuating international treaties on human rights are different at three scales. Within international organizations (specifically within the United Nations and its Committees on Human Rights), it is possible to create conventions and monitor them, making use of the reports. At the nation-state scale, it is possible to formally incorporate the rights of the foreign law into national constitutions, but the punishment related to the violations of these rights will depend on the hierarchical relationship between domestic and foreign law. At the interregional scale, one can observe the effective actions of the juridical institutions (specifically of the Commission and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights) to punish and compensate the victims that suffered violations of the rights guaranteed by international treaties.

Independent children’s rights institutions as guardians of children’s rights contribute to the implementation and monitoring of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UN CRC) in several ways. This chapter focuses on their engagement with the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC Committee) during the country-specific monitoring of the Convention: they can provide reliable, precise and up-to-date information about the situation of children’s rights in the field. While considering the state reports, the CRC Committee welcomes submission from any independent children’s rights institutions, but which institutions have taken this opportunity in the past? Based on the public database of reports submitted by national human rights institutions, without looking into the content of their submissions and the impact of their engagement, this chapter intends to draw the profile of the independent children’s rights institutions that actively engage with the monitoring body of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

This chapter pulls together the main strands of Child Labour in Global Society, and addresses their implications for the sociological study of children’s lives, schooling and slavery.

In popular and scholarly discourses there is a tendency to emphasize the differences between the social lives of children and those of adults rather than the similarities and continuities; to misrepresent children’s social activities in comparison with those of adults; to rationalize the differential way in which children’s social activities and participation are assessed and rewarded relative to those of adults; and to fortify children’s actual and/or assumed marginal situation in modern society.

There are sociological gains to be had from emphasizing the comparable features and structural links between ‘childhood’ and ‘adulthood’ due especially to the common participation of children and adults in productive labour.

The way in which children’s social activities are differentially assessed and rewarded is reflected in how children are denied full citizenship rights, and so are non-citizens.

In particular, children are denied the right to freely exchange their labour power on the labour market.

While viewing educational labour as forced labour does not sit well with ideas about children and childhood in modern society, doing so is consistent with the element of compulsion in for instance the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC).

Being compulsorily required to perform educational labour is indicative of how in modern societies children are owned and in slavery, not just of the de facto kind, but also of the de jure kind.