Content area
Full Text
Abstract: Two transnational legal regimes aim to counter some of the most severe forms of labour exploitation: one centred on the Palermo Protocol that supplements the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime (UNTOC) and the other centred on the International Labour Organization (ILO) Conventions. This article focuses on the relationship between transnational criminal law (TCL) and transnational labour law (TLL) and their effectiveness in tackling labour exploitation. Criminalisation and labour regulation have been seen as competing "paradigms" in tackling human trafficking and modern slavery. TCL has been effective in diffusing criminal law norms around the world, but the modest number of resulting prosecutions can do little to tackle the huge global market in forced or severely exploited labour. TLL, with its more decentralised and pluralistic structure, offers greater hope of achieving some alleviation of labour exploitation.
Keywords: Convention against Transnational Organized Crime; forced labour; human trafficking; International Labour Organization (ILO); Palermo Protocol; transnational labour law; modern slavery
I. Introduction
A number of international conventions require the parties to criminalise certain forms of conduct and to cooperate with other states in prosecuting and preventing such criminal conducts, together with the domestic laws that purport to comply with those conventions. The combination of these "suppression conventions", the domestic laws that purport to implement them and the forms of cooperation associated with them has been dubbed by Neil Boister and others as "transnational criminal law" (TCL). TCL concerns a wide range of activities, many of which involve forms of "trafficking", whether in drugs, arms or wildlife. In this article, we focus on human trafficking and the allied offences, which are sometimes categorised as "modern slavery"-including breaches of the human right to be free from slavery, servitude and forced or compulsory labour.
TCL is one variety of "transnational law",1 a broad concept which in Philip Jessup's classic formulation consists of "all law which regulates actions or events that transcend national frontiers".2 Transnational law can involve a wide range of networks, of varying degrees of formality, linking states, private actors and supranational organisations. Shaffer and Halliday have designated these networks as "transnational legal orders", each comprising "a collection of formalized legal norms and associated organizations and actors that authoritatively order the understanding and practice of law across national...