Slavery in the world ? Today ? Where ?
According to a new and yet another report on the subject, this one by the Walk Free Foundation (WFF), slavery is still not only existent but prevalent in certain countries. Qatar was ranked 5th in the world for slavery prevalence of modern day slavery. The country has reformed its “Kafala” system in 2015 but has yet to put it into practice. The reform of the so-calling foreign workers sponsoring into the country including regulation governing entry and exit form the country and changing jobs, migrant workers in the country were still dependent on their sponsors.
The construction sector, consisting of local and / or international employers alike, is notoriously known for all sorts of reasons to be as it were the greatest users of this type of manpower. This was generally found to be one of the most dominant forms of slavery, reflecting the demand of cheap labour to build infrastructure related to the 2022 FIFA World Cup and the country’s National Vision 2030.
The new law should allow migrant workers to change employers and be tied into residency through only their employment statuses. It is also argued that there was “widespread reluctance” to extend this law to cover the rights of domestic workers.
The WFF recommended that Qatar’s government create an independent reform commission to review labour rights, establish a minimum wage, include domestic workers under labour reforms and properly monitor the non-payment of wages. Here is the introduction/preface of this report.
The countries with the highest estimated prevalence of modern slavery by the proportion of their population are North Korea, Uzbekistan, Cambodia, India, and Qatar. In North Korea, there is pervasive evidence that government-sanctioned forced labour occurs in an extensive system of prison labour camps while North Korean women are subjected to forced marriage and commercial sexual exploitation in China and other neighbouring states. In Uzbekistan, the government continues to subject its citizens to forced labour in the annual cotton harvest.
Those countries with the highest absolute numbers of people in modern slavery are India, China, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Uzbekistan. Several of these countries provide the low-cost labour that produces consumer goods for markets in Western Europe, Japan, North America and Australia.
The countries with the lowest estimated prevalence of modern slavery by the proportion of their population are Luxembourg, Ireland, Norway, Denmark, Switzerland, Austria, Sweden and Belgium, the United States and Canada, and Australia and New Zealand. These countries generally have more economic wealth, score higher on government response, have low levels of conflict, and are politically stable with a willingness to combat modern slavery.
In summary, Qatar, according to this report that gives it a slavery prevalence rate of 1.36%, stood only behind North Korea (4.37%), Uzbekistan (3.97%), Cambodia (1.65%) and India (1.40%) in the Global Slavery Index 2016 by the Walk Free Foundation and in the MENA region, Qatar was followed by Iraq, Yemen, Syria and Yemen, which had estimated slavery prevalence rates of 1.13% each.
Read more at the above mentioned link.
