Exploitation is at the heart of the definition of the crime of human trafficking in the United Nation’s 2000 Palermo Trafficking Protocol. During the drafting process the most contentious issue was whether exploitation is inherent to prostitution, and thus whether prostitution is exploitative even when direct coercion is absent. Since it was hard to reach a clear position, a diplomatic compromise was reached by giving exploitation both a broad and an ambiguous definition.
Exploitation is one of the three constituting elements of human trafficking under the protocol. It states that “exploitation shall include, at a minimum, the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labour or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs.” The addition of other, ‘non-sexual’ forms of exploitation to the definition of human trafficking broke the immediate political logjam, but the meaning of exploitation remains profoundly contested on economic, moral, political, and legal grounds. The explicit reference to forced labour in particular has provoked a lively debate about what kinds of practices and conditions amount to labour exploitation both within and beyond the context of human trafficking.
This debate is important because how we frame or conceptualise labour exploitation shapes the strategies and policies that we devise to deal with it. At the same time, we need to prevent ourselves from getting so mired in nuance that we forget why we are trying to define exploitation in the first place. If the goal is to eradicate labour exploitation, carving out its most extreme forms and criminalising them cannot be the solution. Instead, we need a strategic approach to addressing labour exploitation, one which identifies the relationship between different forms of exploitation and their drivers and, on that basis, develops the capacities of local actors to make sustainable, system-wide changes.
