Speech by Bandana Pattanaik at the fifth Global Compact thematic consultation
Speech delivered by Bandana Pattanaik, International Coordinator of the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women (GAATW), at the fifth thematic consultation ‘Smuggling of migrants, trafficking in persons and contemporary forms of slavery, including appropriate identification, protection and assistance to migrants and trafficking victims’
5-7 September 2017, Vienna, Austria
Panel 3: Appropriate identification, protection, and assistance to migrants and trafficking victims
First, I want to acknowledge the debt I owe to the many survivors of trafficking and migrant workers, some of whom have organised themselves to advocate for their rights, and whose lived experiences, struggles, extraordinary courage and resilience have taught me what I know about the realities of migration and work in today’s world.
Before I talk about the issue of rights protection and assistance, I’d like to say a few words about the context in which we currently live and work. The international community has undertaken an extremely ambitious task by deciding to work on a Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration. The world we live in today looks anything but safe and orderly and human security is at an all-time low. Rising income and wealth disparity have polarised people within the same society and the many layers of discrimination and social inequalities have not gone away despite the efforts at several levels in all parts of the world. As the 2017 Oxfam report An Economy for the 99% points out, just eight men have the same wealth as the poorest half of the world. At the World Economic Forum this year, even those who were the most eloquent proponents of economic globalisation a decade ago, called for a fundamental rethinking of the current economic model. The Oxfam report called for a more humane economy, an economy for the 99%! To this worrying data on rising inequality, if we add just two of the more obvious threats to human security - climate change and the crises in democracy in many parts of the world - the bleak picture is almost complete.
In 2015-2016, the GAATW International Secretariat undertook a project called the ‘South Asia – Middle East Access to Justice Project’ (SAME A2J Project) as part of a larger initiative, ‘Addressing Labour Trafficking of South Asian Migrant Workers in the Middle East.’ The objective of the SAME A2J Project was to identify cases in which migrant workers who had travelled to the Middle East as temporary labour migrants were trafficked, and to identify the barriers those workers faced accessing justice. The rationale for the project was a perception within GAATW that migrant workers from South Asia who were coerced, defrauded or deceived into situations of severe exploitation were rarely treated as trafficked persons and rarely received an adequate remedy.