The 1926 Slavery Convention’s Centennial in Context

What do you do when you realize moral failure has underwritten your life? The global community faced that same reckoning in 1926. The passage of the 1926 Slavery Convention highlighted the dramatic tension between what is right, what is possible, and what sets up a flourishing future.

In 1926, the world was addicted, not to opium or an intoxicating substance, but to the profitable exploitation of people. The same year, as world leaders gathered to craft the Slavery Convention, they admitted that the systems prior generations handed down to them were utterly corrupt. Yet, deconstructing those systems seemed absurd because they propped up the global economy and power structures. The hull of the ship of state was rotten, rendering it unseaworthy, even as it sailed.

Complicated Mixed Motives

Untangling exploitation from the economy was a massive undertaking. Any first step of progress would seem insufficient in isolation. Like learning one’s letters for the illiterate or adopting a modest diet for the chronically unhealthy, the first steps toward a better way are not an ultimate fix and do not generate immediate results. Yet, without the first step, there can be no second or third steps in the better direction.

This is the context in which the authors of the 1926 Slavery Convention wrestled. They were thoughtful and imperfect individuals who knew that forced labor and sex trafficking were a moral abomination and who likely wished prior generations had not kicked the proverbial can of abolition down the historic road. Yet, like a bloated national debt haphazardly passed to future generations, slavery’s bill came due.

The 1926 Slavery Convention may be one of the short-lived League of Nations’ greatest contributions. It was the first international legal instrument to attack the pernicious practice of slavery. At that time, the United Kingdom had already ended its transatlantic slave trade and emancipated many enslaved people, and the United States’ Thirteenth Amendment, which outlawed slavery, was 61 years old.

By 1926, industrialization had transformed the global economy, marginalizing the plantation-based slavery model. Concerns about the “white slave trade” were also sweeping Europe and North America, generating a fresh wave of selective empathy. Although the convention’s drafters were not united in their motivations or strategies, they were all in a world that was shifting away from a legal ownership slavery model toward a system of forced labor based on coercion.

The Slavery Convention’s Compromises

There were those debating the 1926 Slavery Convention who wanted complete abolition of slavery in all its forms, including private and public forced labor. Others sought only to solidify the gains already made over the prior 119 years since William Wilberforce led the end of the UK slave trade. It was a duel between those seeking what was best and right and those seeking what was politically possible. Ultimately, the Slavery Convention compromised principle and only banned slavery-as-ownership, not slavery-as-practice: Article 1 defines slavery as “the status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised.”

The convention legalistically framed slavery as a property issue, sidestepping forms of bondage where no one claimed formal “ownership.” That gap is why forced labor and sex trafficking compelled by force, fraud, and coercion went unaddressed in this first international legal step. The Slavery Convention also did not apply to forced labor in the British, French, and other imperial powers’ colonies, and Article 9 of the Slavery Convention gave governments an additional line-item opt-out provision from the Slavery Convention’s requirements if they wanted to enslave people. The Slavery Convention seemed like a lackluster social signaling exercise rather than a bold commitment.

Progress Since 1926

With a century of distance, the many additional steps toward abolition that followed the Slavery Convention are visible. It is easy to criticize the 1926 leaders for not condemning human trafficking in all its forms, but perhaps people can only leap so far from the gravitational pull of their historic context.

Since the 1926 Slavery Convention, the international community has taken many more steps away from slavery and toward freedom. The most significant may be the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which renounced slavery in Article 4 and expanded the definition beyond formal legal ownership. The 2000 UN Protocol against trafficking in persons, which addresses the coercive means modern human traffickers employ, is one of the most adopted international legal instruments, ratified by 185 countries.

The UN Protocol matched the reach of the U.S. Trafficking Victims Protection Act. Since 2000, the United Kingdom and other Commonwealth countries have passed increasingly stringent modern slavery acts. Now, virtually every country in the world has a law against human trafficking. Although they vary in quality, this legal consensus signals a 180-degree shift in global thinking on human trafficking since the abolition of the slave trade and the Slavery Convention.

Many countries have also passed laws to ensure that governments do not prosecute human trafficking victims for the unlawful acts their traffickers compel them to engage in, sometimes called “forced criminality.” Seeing governments arresting sex trafficking victims for selling commercial sex, many countries enacted laws that only hold those purchasing sex or managing the sale of others for sex accountable. The world has also witnessed supply chain laws, transparency laws, forced labor bans, due diligence laws, as well as tariffs and sanctions to discourage modern human trafficking.

These subsequent steps beyond the Slavery Convention reached not just slavery-as-ownership, but slavery-as-practice. And these important developments occurred while combating new forms of exploitation, such as online sex trafficking, peer-to-peer file sharing of child sexual abuse material (CSAM), live streaming of CSAM, and sextortion rings. In the last six years, internet-fueled scam centers have developed a model of double victimization. Traffickers use forced labor victims within the scam centers to create financial fraud victims around the world. A tremendous amount of work remains unfinished.

Today’s Unfinished Business

The global community has come a long way. An honest assessment of the 1926 Slavery Convention should not be too simplistic; it was not a “one and done” international instrument that fully addressed slavery. The convention was incomplete at its creation, yet it also holds an important place in history as the first international legal instrument to redirect all cultures away from a shared barbaric past. It is right and good to celebrate this historic centennial.

Despite the Slavery Convention and all the other important steps that have followed since 1926, human trafficking continues. As laws, culture, political will, technology, and economic circumstances have changed, traffickers have adapted and modernized. While most governments have backed away from publicly supporting human trafficking, 13 governments continue to traffic at least 3.9 million people in forced labor and sex trafficking. These examples of state-sanctioned forced labor resist traditional intervention efforts.

Unable to operate in the open, traffickers have now embedded human trafficking into the global economy. The International Labor Organization estimates that traffickers are exploiting 27.6 million people in sex trafficking and forced labor, in farms, factories, mining operations, manufacturing facilities, and massage parlors. Cobalt for batteries, cocoa for chocolate bars, and silica for solar panels are the foundation for industries relying on modern slavery. Many consumers have become accustomed to fast fashion, cheap electronics, and accessible consumer goods without considering how traffickers impact commerce. Yet, it is the companies using forced labor who receive a significant financial benefit from modern slavery and are in a unique position to demand fair markets.

On the 1926 Slavery Convention’s centennial, September 25, let us celebrate incomplete progress without allowing complacency to mute the urgency to take additional steps. The millions of victims suffering today should motivate all to drive another century of effort to build a principled foundation for freedom.

John Cotton Richmond is a senior adviser (non-resident) with the Human Rights Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., and a former U.S. ambassador-at-large to monitor and combat trafficking in persons.