One hundred years ago, the League of Nations adopted the Slavery Convention, the first international legal instrument to address slavery. Since then, the international community has taken more steps toward freedom, including the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the 2000 UN Protocol against trafficking in persons, which 185 countries have ratified. The centennial of the 1926 Slavery Convention provides an opportunity to study the lessons of the value that even incomplete progress holds when paired with urgency to continue the work in the global fight for freedom today.
Read Ambassador John Cotton Richmond's original article published with the Human Rights Initiative of the Center for Strategic & International Studies here.
Ambassador John Cotton Richmond is President of the Libertas Council. He served as the U.S. Ambassador to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons and as a federal prosecutor in the Department of Justice’s Human Trafficking Prosecution Unit.
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