Christopher M. Roberts, Chinese University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law, has posted The Historical Development of the Concept of Forced Labor and the Open Boundaries of its Definition Today, which appears in the New Mexico Law Review:
This article considers the steps taken on the international level in the 1920s and 30s to define the terms through which freedom and unfreedom in the context of labor might be understood, the manner in which understandings of forced labor have subsequently evolved, and the parameters and potentials of the concept today. The first section explores the history of the 1926 Slavery Convention; the nature of coercive labor in colonized states in the inter-war period; the drafting processes and coverage of the 1930 Forced Labour Convention; the Convention’s accompanying recommendations; and subsequent developments in the legal definition of forced labor. The second section considers various different areas in which the boundaries of the concept of forced labor are open-ended today, with an eye to determining whether the concept is capable of addressing hitherto under-recognized forms of labor coercion, or whether it is fatally limited by the conditions of its formation. In particular, the section considers areas of explicit limitation; the potential contained within the terms of the Forced Labour (Indirect Compulsion) Recommendation; and what potential there is for forced labor to be deployed relative to an issue not intensively addressed in 1930, that of debt. This article concludes that, despite the limitations that have accompanied the idea of forced labor to date, the concept remains a useful one, the boundaries of which maintain extensive space for expansion.--Dan Ernst
