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Offer of help from the state of North Rhine-Westphalia for those affected by forced marriage
Photo: Rolf Vennenbernd / dpa
According to the United Nations, around 50 million people worldwide are stuck in situations known as "modern slavery".
The International Labor Organization of the UN (ILO) published its new report this Monday and counts around 28 million forced laborers and 22 million people who were forced into marriage.
(Here the report ) In the past five years since the last report, the number of people affected has increased by ten million.
According to the analysis, which the aid organizations International Organization for Migration (IOM) and Walk Free Foundation collaborated on, the problem exists in practically every country in the world and the effects of the corona pandemic have exacerbated it.
Combined with the effects of climate change and armed conflict, the pandemic has had a devastating impact on employment and education in many places, the report said.
The consequences are »an increase in extreme poverty and forced and unsafe migration«.
Accordingly, migrants are more than three times as likely to be affected by forced labor as other people.
According to the ILO, more than half of forced labor and a quarter of forced marriages occur in middle- and high-income countries.
Women and children are by far the most at risk, with one in five people affected being a child.
"It is shocking that the situation of modern slavery is not improving," said ILO chief Guy Ryder.
"Nothing can justify the persistence of these fundamental violations of human rights."
The number of people affected by forced marriage – mostly women and girls – has increased by 6.6 million since the last global estimate in 2016.
The number of people in forced labor increased by 2.7 million over the same period, the report says.
Although this increase in forced labor is primarily due to the private sector, 14 percent of those affected still work for state authorities, the ILO explained.
At this point, the report criticizes forced labor in prisons – a common practice in many countries, such as the USA.
In particular, the UN experts refer to the situation in North Korea, where there are "credible reports of forced labor under exceptionally harsh conditions."
In China, too, several UN organizations have denounced the spread of forced labour, particularly in the Xinjiang region.
The government in Beijing is accused of imprisoning more than a million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in camps there.
mamk/kig/AFP