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Anti-Trafficking Law as a key to Global Economic Contradictions: A Response to Janie Chuang

Part of: Janie A. Chuang, “Exploitation Creep and the Unmaking of Human Trafficking Law”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Chantal Thomas
Chantal Thomas*
Affiliation:
Cornell Law School
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Anti-trafficking law, with its rapid ascent to public visibility since the establishment of the Palermo Protocol fifteen years ago, offers a highly salient framework for understanding, and addressing, human exploitation. Yet this framework, as Professor Janie Chuang brilliantly illustrates in her article, Exploitation Creep and the Un-making of Human Trafficking Law,1 has proven both over-inclusive and, simultaneously and problematically, under-inclusive in its endeavors.

The anti-trafficking framework is broad enough to have overlapped substantially with potentially competing legal and institutional regimes through the “exploitation creep” that Chuang identifies—regimes that ban, re-spectively, forced labor (“Creep 1”) and slavery (“Creep 2”). If brought to fruition, Chuang’s exposition suggests, the effect of anti-trafficking’s exploitation creep may be to marginalize the positive international law of forced labor and slavery treaties, and perhaps even to render them entirely superfluous.

Type
Symposium: Janie A. Chuang, “Exploitation Creep and the Unmaking of Human Trafficking Law”
Information
AJIL Unbound , Volume 108 , 2014 , pp. 277 - 281
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of International Law 2014

References

1 Janie Chuang, Exploitation Creep and the Unmaking of Human Trafficking Law, 108 AJIL 609 (2015).

2 Id. at 611-612.

3 Janet Halley et al., From the International to the Local in Feminist Legal Responses: Four Studies in Contemporary Governance Feminism, 29 Harv. J. L. & GENDER 336, 388-392 (2006) (section by Chantal Thomas) (describing the “distributional consequences” of anti-trafficking law as the enforcement of sovereigntist border control agendas, the legitimation of exploitive work conditions not deemed to be trafficking, and the exacerbation of vulnerability of populations subject to trafficking through the perverse effects of criminalization).

4 See, e.g., Janie Chuang, The U.S. Au Pair Program: Labor Exploitation and the Myth of Cultural Exchange, 36 Harv. J. L. & Gender 269 (2013); Janie Chuang, Article 6, in The un Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women: A Commentary (Marsha Freeman et al. eds., 2012); Janie Chuang, Rescuing Trafficking from Ideological Capture: Prostitution Reform and Anti-Trafficking Law and Policy, 158 U. PA. L. REV. 1655 (2010); Janie Chuang, Achieving Accountability for Migrant Domestic Worker Abuse, 88 N.C. L. REV. 1627 (2010); Janie Chuang, The United States as Global Sheriff: Unilateral Sanctions and Human Trafficking, 27 Mich. J. Intl. L. 437 (2006); Janie Chuang, Beyond a Snapshot: Human Trafficking and the Politics of Labor Migration in a Globalized Economy, 13 Ind. J. Global Leg. Stud. 137 (Winter 2006); Janie Chuang, Reconceptualizing Trafficking in Women: Definitions, Paradigms, and Contexts, 11 Harv. Hum. Rights J. 65 (1998).

5 Interdisciplinary Project on Human Trafficking.

6 Clifford Bob, Re-Framing Exploitation Creep to Fight Human Trafficking: A Response to Professor Janie Chuang, 108 AJIL Unbound 264 (2015).

7 Karen Bravo, A Crossroads in the Fight Against Human Trafficking?: A Response to Professor Janie Chuang, 108 AJIL Unbound 272(2015).

8 Chantal Thomas, Immigration Controls and Modern-Day Slavery9 (2013).

9 Anne Gallagher, Human Rights and Human Trafficking: Quagmire or Firm Ground? 49 VA.J.INT’L L.789, 790 (2009), quoted in Thomas, supra note 8,at 8.

10 Halley et al., supra note 3, at 388-389 (describing limitations of the UN and U.S.provisions for relief and support of trafficking victims).

11 Aziza Ahmed, Exploitation Creep in Development: A Response to Professor Janie Chuang, 108 AJIL Unbound268 (2015).

12 Chantal Thomas, Governance Feminism in the Global Political Economy (manuscript on file with author).

13 Id. at 44.

14 Bernard Harcourt, The Illusion of Free Markets (2011).

15 Chantal Thomas, Disciplining Globalization: Law, Illegal Trade, and the Case of Narcotics, 24 Mich. J. Int’l L. 549 (2003); Halley et al., supra note 3; Chantal Thomas, Effects of Globalization in Mexico, 1980-2000: Labour Migration as an Unintended Consequence, in Social Regionalism in the Global Economy (Adelle Blackett & Christian Lävesque eds., 2010); Chantal Thomas, Undocumented Migrant Workers in a Fragmented International Order, 25 MD. J. Int’l L. 187 (2010).

16 Chantal Thomas, International Law Against Sex Trafficking, in Perspective 23.

17 West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, 300 U.S. 379 (1937) (upholding minimum wage law for women).