On July 19, Verité and the International Cocoa Initiative kicked off a forced labor indicators training for human rights advisors of the National Council of Human Rights (Conseil Nacional des Droits de l’Homme— CNDH), an independent body that is tasked with ensuring the Côte d’Ivoire government’s adherence to all international treaties and cooperation agreements that the government has signed.
Debt bondage, due to the imposition of recruitment fees and costs on foreign migrant workers, remains the most pervasive and entrenched form of forced labor in global supply chains today. Reimbursement is an important remedy but, on its own, it is not a solution to the underlying root causes of this ongoing labor abuse.
The U.S. prison system has been under increasing scrutiny in recent years for issues such as systematic racism, inhumane conditions, overcrowding, and sexual violence. While these issues are extremely pressing, another important issue, forced prison labor, is often overlooked. Therefore, as a labor rights organization, Verité determined that we could most effectively contribute to the critique of the U.S. prison system by lending an international human rights lens to the conversation on prison labor.
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The political and humanitarian crises in Ukraine are reshaping the landscape for supply chain accountability throughout the broader region. More than 4 million refugees have fled Ukraine into neighboring countries, according to the UN. Prior to the Ukraine crisis, the numbers of internally displaced people and refugees globally were already at record highs, with more than 26 million Syrians, Central Americans, Venezuelans, South Sudanese, Rohingya, and others living as refugees abroad, and more than 84 million people around the world forcibly displaced in the first half of 2021.