Human trafficking conviction in England, in kidney case-""the consent of the person trafficked is no defense."

 The BBC has the story, which is apparently the first such conviction for kidney trafficking under Britain's anti-slavery law. Reading the previous stories, it sounds like the young man in question was being deceived.  But even informed consent apparently wouldn't be a defense under British law...

Kidney-plot politician Ike Ekweremadu jailed By Tom Symonds

"A wealthy Nigerian politician, his wife and their "middleman" have been jailed for an organ-trafficking plot, after bringing a man to the UK from Lagos.

"Senator Ike Ekweremadu, 60, and his wife Beatrice, 56, wanted a new kidney for their 25-year-old daughter Sonia, the Old Bailey heard.

"The pair and Dr Obinna Obeta, 50, were previously convicted of conspiring to exploit the man.

"It is said to be the first such case under modern slavery laws.

...

"Lynette Woodrow, deputy chief crown prosecutor and national modern slavery lead at the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), said it had been "our first conviction for trafficking for the purposes of organ removal in England and Wales".

"She said it highlighted an important legal principle which made it irrelevant whether the trafficking victim knew he was coming to the UK to provide a kidney.

"With all trafficking offences," Ms Woodrow said, "the consent of the person trafficked is no defence. The law is clear; you cannot consent to your own exploitation."

HT: Dr. Jlateh Vincent Jappah

Grocery supply chains: TNR reviews "The Secret Life of Groceries"

 The New Republic reviews The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket, by Benjamin Lorr,  (It tells you more than you want to know about supply chains, from farmed shrimp in Thailand to American long haul trucking...)

There’s No Such Thing as Ethical Grocery Shopping--“The Secret Life of Groceries” exposes the dark secrets of America’s food supply. by Josephine Livingstone

Having read the review but not the book, it sounds like a broad based followup on this 2015 story from the Guardian:

Shrimp sold by global supermarkets is peeled by slave labourers in Thailand

by Associated Press: Margie Mason, Robin McDowell and Esther Htusan in Samut Sakhon and Martha Mendoza in Washington Mon 14 Dec 2015

Modern slavery, in supply chains and around the world

The Global Slavery Index recently issued its report for 2018.
They say: "In the context of this report, modern slavery covers a set of specific legal concepts including forced labour, debt bondage, forced marriage, slavery and slavery-like practices, and human trafficking."

While we're apparently all lucky not to live in N. Korea, the report doesn't stop there. For one thing, it suggests that a lot of supply chains may involve involuntary labor of various sorts.  The NY Times headline summarizes the aspects of the report that might be of most concern to readers of this blog:

Report Finds Surprisingly High Rate of Slavery in Developed Countries

"The 2018 edition of the index estimates that more than 40 million people around the world are trapped in modern slavery — including what Walk Free called a surprisingly high number in developed nations like the United States, France, Germany and others.

“Given these are also the countries taking the most action to respond to modern slavery, this does not mean these initiatives are in vain,” the survey said. “It does, however, underscore that even in countries with seemingly strong laws and systems, there are critical gaps in protections for groups such as irregular migrants, the homeless, workers in the shadow or gig economy, and certain minorities.”

"In the United States, more than 400,000 people, or one in 800, are living in modern slavery, the report said. The United States is also the largest importer of what the report called “at-risk” products, or those at least partly manufactured by workers engaged in forced labor.

"These products, estimated to be worth at least $354 billion, include mobile phones, computers, clothing and food like fish and cocoa, the report said. The United States imports more than 40 percent of the total."

Cadavers and the slave trade

The NY Times has an article on the intersection of the slave trade in the United States with the market for cadavers for anatomy classes in medical schools:

Beyond the Slave Trade, the Cadaver Trade, By Daina Ramey Berry

"One shocking fact that’s recently come to light: Major medical schools used slave corpses, acquired through an underground market in dead bodies, for education and research.

"Yes, there was a robust body-snatching industry in which cadavers — mostly the bodies of black people, many of whom had been enslaved when they were alive — were used at Harvard, the Universities of Maryland, Pennsylvania and Virginia, and other institutions.
...
"Body snatchers like Grandison Harris of Georgia and Chris Baker of Virginia collected specimens for dissection for the benefit of medical colleges. While they received room, board and modest wages for the bodies they collected, they were also enslaved African-American men themselves, listed as “janitors” or “porters” in the medical schools’ records."
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See some of my earlier posts on the cadaver trade:

Monday, July 3, 2017

Cadavers and the teaching of anatomy

Saturday, February 18, 2012

Markets for cadavers

Thursday, June 30, 2011

Medical education in Paris in the 1830's--cheap cadavers

Repugnant markets watch: ISIS institutionalizes a market for sex slaves (NY Times)

The NY Times has a long article on sex slavery in the Islamic State, by Rukmini Callimachi, including some detail about the market's rules and institutional features:

ISIS Enshrines a Theology of Rape--Claiming the Quran’s support, the Islamic State codifies sex slavery in conquered regions of Iraq and Syria and uses the practice as a recruiting tool.

"The systematic rape of women and girls from the Yazidi religious minority has become deeply enmeshed in the organization and the radical theology of the Islamic State in the year since the group announced it was reviving slavery as an institution.
...
"The trade in Yazidi women and girls has created a persistent infrastructure, with a network of warehouses where the victims are held, viewing rooms where they are inspected and marketed, and a dedicated fleet of buses used to transport them.
...
"A growing body of internal policy memos and theological discussions has established guidelines for slavery, including a lengthy how-to manual issued by the Islamic State Research and Fatwa Department just last month.
...
"The Islamic State’s formal introduction of systematic sexual slavery dates to Aug. 3, 2014, when its fighters invaded the villages on the southern flank of Mount Sinjar, a craggy massif of dun-colored rock in northern Iraq.
...
"Their captors appeared to have a system in place, replete with its own methodology of inventorying the women, as well as their own lexicon. Women and girls were referred to as “Sabaya,” followed by their name. Some were bought by wholesalers, who photographed and gave them numbers, to advertise them to potential buyers.

"Osman Hassan Ali, a Yazidi businessman who has successfully smuggled out numerous Yazidi women, said he posed as a buyer in order to be sent the photographs. He shared a dozen images, each one showing a Yazidi woman sitting in a bare room on a couch, facing the camera with a blank, unsmiling expression. On the edge of the photograph is written in Arabic, “Sabaya No. 1,” “Sabaya No. 2,” and so on.
...
"The use of sex slavery by the Islamic State initially surprised even the group’s most ardent supporters, many of whom sparred with journalists online after the first reports of systematic rape."
...
"In a pamphlet published online in December, the Research and Fatwa Department of the Islamic State detailed best practices, including explaining that slaves belong to the estate of the fighter who bought them and therefore can be willed to another man and disposed of just like any other property after his death.

"Recent escapees describe an intricate bureaucracy surrounding their captivity, with their status as a slave registered in a contract. When their owner would sell them to another buyer, a new contract would be drafted, like transferring a property deed. At the same time, slaves can also be set free, and fighters are promised a heavenly reward for doing so.

"Though rare, this has created one avenue of escape for victims.

"A 25-year-old victim who escaped last month, identified by her first initial, A, described how one day her Libyan master handed her a laminated piece of paper. He explained that he had finished his training as a suicide bomber and was planning to blow himself up, and was therefore setting her free."

Modern slavery: The State Department's Trafficking in Persons Report 2014

Read it and weep.

Trafficking in Persons Report 2014

Related news story and editorial:
U.S. Gives Thailand and Malaysia Lowest Grade on Human Trafficking

Slavery and the Shrimp on Your Plate: Thai Seafood Is Contaminated by Human Trafficking

Repugnant transactions in Nigeria: education, kidnapping and slavery

The news out of Nigeria has too many repugnant transactions to shake a stick at. The Islamic organization Boko Haram, whose name apparently means something like "education is forbidden" and which has kidnapped school girls, is threatening to sell them...

DAKAR, Senegal — In a video message apparently made by the leader of the Nigerian Islamist group Boko Haram, Abubakar Shekau claimed responsibility for the kidnapping of hundreds of schoolgirls nearly three weeks ago, called them slaves and threatened to “sell them in the market, by Allah.”

“Western education should end,” Mr. Shekau said in the 57-minute video, speaking in Hausa and Arabic. “Girls, you should go and get married.” The Islamist leader also warned that he would “give their hands in marriage because they are our slaves. We would marry them out at the age of 9. We would marry them out at the age of 12.”

...

The message from the Boko Haram leader once again highlighted the extent to which secular, Western-style schools are a principal target of the group, whose name roughly translates as “Western education is forbidden,” in an amalgam of pidgin English, Arabic and Hausa, one of the most commonly spoken languages in Africa. Mr. Shekau emphasized that the girls were taken because they were attending such a school.

“Western education is sin, it is forbidden, women must go and marry,” he said in the video message. "

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Update: the quote above is from this NY Times story: Nigerian Islamist Leader Threatens to Sell Kidnapped Girls

Slavery around the world in 2013

This ancient, repugnant transaction is not abolished yet, according to the Global Slavery Index 2013, published by the Walk Free Foundation. (Here's a link to the full report.)

"The Global Slavery Index 2013 measures the size of the modern slavery problem, country by country. The Index provides a quantitative ranking of 162 countries around the world according to the estimated prevalence of slavery, that is, the estimated percentage of enslaved people in the national population at a point in time. The Global Slavery Index also examines the risk factors and outlines the strength of the government responses in the fight against modern slavery."

Mauritania and Haiti are high per capita, India is big on total numbers

Sex trafficking from Nepal to India

This story from the NY Times reports on sex trafficking in which at least some women are kidnapped and involuntarily sold to brothels: Women, Bought and Sold in Nepal.

"Although reliable data on the scope of the issue is difficult to gather, Unicef reports that as many as 7,000 women and girls are trafficked out of Nepal to India every year, and around 200,000 are now working in Indian brothels."
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Market designers spend a lot of our time trying to make failed markets succeed, but this kind of thing is a reminder that many markets succeed so well that even making them illegal isn't sufficient to make them fail. I don't know enough about this particular market, but in general we might spend some time thinking on how to make illegal markets fail...

The resale market for babies

The BBC reports: Indonesian babies held hostage by unpaid midwives

"There are lots of cases where, if the mother can't pay, the baby becomes the property of the hospital," says Mr Sirait. "They then believe they have the right to sell the baby to someone else."

Slavery in the U.S.

At the conference I'm attending in Finland, there's been a good deal of discussion (with more to come) of repugnant transactions, with an undercurrent of concern that globalization and other kinds of encroachment of markets on traditionally non-market ways of allocating resources will inevitably cause things presently regarded with repugnance to become more customary.

It's good to remember that our repugnance at certain transactions doesn't have to diminish over time (as does happen with many formerly repugnant transactions like same sex marriage).  Slavery (and indentured servitude, and other forms of servitude) were once regarded with much less repugnance--certainly much less nearly universal repugnance--than they are today.

The NY Times recently published a Civil War era map of where slaves were in the United States in 1860:
Visualizing Slavery

"South Carolina, which led the rebellion, was one of two states which enslaved a majority of its population, a fact starkly represented on the map."
                                              
                                               http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/12/10/opinion/20101210_Disunion_SlaveryMap.html

The slave trade had sellers as well as buyers

In a NY Times oped, Ending the Slavery Blame-Game, Henry Louis Gates Jr. writes about the slave trade.

"While we are all familiar with the role played by the United States and the European colonial powers like Britain, France, Holland, Portugal and Spain, there is very little discussion of the role Africans themselves played. And that role, it turns out, was a considerable one, especially for the slave-trading kingdoms of western and central Africa. These included the Akan of the kingdom of Asante in what is now Ghana, the Fon of Dahomey (now Benin), the Mbundu of Ndongo in modern Angola and the Kongo of today’s Congo, among several others.
For centuries, Europeans in Africa kept close to their military and trading posts on the coast. Exploration of the interior, home to the bulk of Africans sold into bondage at the height of the slave trade, came only during the colonial conquests, which is why Henry Morton Stanley’s pursuit of Dr. David Livingstone in 1871 made for such compelling press: he was going where no (white) man had gone before.
How did slaves make it to these coastal forts? The historians John Thornton and Linda Heywood of Boston University estimate that 90 percent of those shipped to the New World were enslaved by Africans and then sold to European traders. The sad truth is that without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents, the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible, at least on the scale it occurred."

Changes in repugnant transactions are sometimes gradual

Years from now we may look back on the gradual change in the status of same sex marriage , for example, or the ability of gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military, and be puzzled at what took so long. But it's useful to look back on the abolition of slavery to get some perspective.
In 1780, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania passed An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery, starting with children born in Pennsylvania following the passage of the act, but not altering the status of slaves owned by Pennsylvanians at the time of the act.

It took another 85 years before the 13th Amendment to the Constitution declared that "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." The 13th Amendment was passed by the Congress on January 31, 1865, and ratified by the states on December 6, 1865.


HT: Volokh conspiracy