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May 22, 2002
U.S. diplomat says time to shine spotlight on modern evil of slavery
By John Thavis
VATICAN CITY (CNS) — On the eve of a major international conference on human trafficking, U.S. Ambassador to the Vatican Jim Nicholson said he thinks it is time to shine a spotlight on an evil that has turned at least 700,000 people into "modern slaves."
"Moral outrage is needed," Nicholson said. "A huge number of people are being held as slaves. They've been deprived of their freedom, their identity, their dignity and their humanity.
"And that is not a condition that those of us who have a lot of gifts in life and who believe in a civil society should countenance," he said in an interview with Catholic News Service May 13.
Nicholson was the prime mover behind a May 15-16 conference in Rome on "21st-Century Slavery: The Human Rights Dimension to Trafficking in Human Beings." Sponsored by a group of diplomats accredited to the Holy See, it was supported by the Vatican Secretariat of State and Vatican agencies that deal with justice and migration issues.
Nicholson said the conference aimed to bring media attention to an issue that has remained largely invisible.
"My conviction is that it is not until you take a big problem and make it well known and reach a critical mass of awareness and outrage that you can really bring to bear the forces needed to fix it," he said.
That awareness has provoked massive efforts against diseases like AIDS or social ills like slavery of past centuries, he said.
"This is slavery II," he said, noting that estimates of human beings who are dealt with as commodities range from 700,000 to almost 4 million.
Many of the victims are women who fell prey to prostitution rings or others who are literally bought and sold for their economic worth. Globalization, with its relaxing of trade and transportation barriers, may be aggravating the problem, Nicholson said.
"Certainly the globalization of organized crime has contributed to it. That's really who has taken it over. It appears that now it's the third most lucrative business they're in, next to drugs and guns," he said.
He applauded the fact that the U.S. Congress passed a law in 2000 to track these criminals more carefully and build a database that can be used in cooperation with other countries.
Those kinds of legal steps are needed so that governments around the world can act, he said.
"There is no simple solution to this. It's fed by need and it's fed by greed," he said. Many poor people are vulnerable to the lure of material gain in another country, and they are easily exploited by their new masters, who use fear and violence to intimidate them, he said.
Nicholson said he was pleased that the Vatican had taken a deep interest in the issue, and that two top officials of the Holy See were participating in the conference.
When he approached other members of the diplomatic corps about the idea of a conference on human trafficking, he wasn't sure how they would react. But he said they enthusiastically backed the idea and helped put together a program that focuses on human rights, legislative prevention measures, re-integration of trafficking victims into society, and the role of religious organizations and the media.
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