World Day Against Child Labour: “Every Child Deserves a Safe Childhood”𝐆𝐥𝐨𝐛𝐚𝐥 𝐑𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐝𝐭𝐚𝐛𝐥𝐞 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟔

Forced child labour is one of the abominations confronting humanity today yet while recognising its abhorrence we must also recognise its complexity. Moreover, this conference is held only shortly after the appalling announcement by the Taliban Government in Afghanistan of Decree No. 18 (the "Directive on the Separation of Spouses") which codifies and legitimizes child marriages by effectively removing the minimum age and declaring that a minor virgin girl’s silence at puberty constitutes consent to marriage. The new code establishes that a virgin girl's silence upon reaching puberty is legally interpreted as agreement to marriage and, in addition, the fixed minimum age of 16 has been removed, linking marital eligibility exclusively to the onset of puberty. 

Girls being forced into marriage and effectively being raped by older men is not unique to Afghanistan. Many countries that seek recognition as being civilised still allow this practice. Newly married young girls are made to go to live in the home of their husband and are then often terrorised and bullied by their new mother-in-law who is the matron of the house. A refusal or attempt to escape from this domestic imprisonment can result in so-called “honour” killings in which in many cases the girl’s father is complicit because dishonour has been brought on the family. As the father of two girls myself I shudder with horror at the perversion that enables a father to condone the murder of his child. Many cultures and religions regard the family as a basic stabiliser of society and yet this practice flies in the face of not only morality but common decency.

This, then, is my starting point because I want to examine the practice of exploitation of children in domestic and labour situations and what is being and can be done to overcome it from two perspectives. The first is ethical and the second is practical.

The ethical dimension has to start with an examination of the essential element of humanity. In Christianity a human being is created in the image of God – a difficult concept to grasp but meaning that all human beings have an inherent dignity before utility or productivity which cannot be overridden. That human dignity is the basis of human rights of all, whatever their ethnic background or wherever situated in the world. 

In 1624 by English poet and cleric John Donne wrote his famous poem:

“No man is an island,Entire of itself,Every man is a piece of the continent,A part of the main.

Any man's death diminishes me,Because I am involved in mankind.”

Thomas Jefferson in 1776 wrote the iconic passage that asserts that natural rights are fundamental and universal:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."  I do not need to tell this audience in what document that appears. 

A string of philosophers throughout history have advanced the concept of natural rights including John Locke who argued that all individuals possess inherent, inalienable natural rights to life, liberty, and property (or estate).

In modern times it has been encapsulated by the singer Joan Baez in No Man Is an Island:

“No man is an islandNo man stands aloneEach man's joy is joy to meEach man's grief is my ownWe need one anotherSo I will defendEach man as my brotherEach man as my friend.”

Yet changes in perceived morality and consequent change in action take a long time. 

In the UK we pride ourselves in having the Mother of Parliaments yet, despite the origins of the assertion of the rights of the citizen over the divine right of kings from the time of Magna Carta, it was a thousand years before the full franchise and women had the vote – and that only within the last century. In the cradle of democracy, ancient Greece, neither women nor the helots (slaves) had a vote. Slavery which for the vanquished was the inevitable outcome of the vanquished for thousands of years was only abolished in many countries within the last two hundred years and is still prevalent in practice as well as concept in many countries. Moreover, we should not forget that Christianity and the Bible were invoked as evidence that slavery had divine justification. Slaves (as indeed were women until the 19^th century in the UK) were regarded as chattels so when slavery was abolished it was the slave owners who received government compensation for the loss of their property and not the slaves themselves. Many countries, including the UK, are still trying to deal with the legacy of slavery and its impact which will endure for a long time. 

It must be hoped that the moral condemnation as well as its practice of child labour does not take a similar time. Exactly a year ago the joint report of the International Labour Organization (ILO) and UNICEF entitled “Child Labour: Global estimates 2024, trends and the road forward" pointed out that in 2015, the world made a promise to end child labour by 2025. That timeline had expired but child labour had not. Today, nearly 138 million children remain in child labour worldwide including around 54 million in hazardous work likely to jeopardize their health, safety, or development. The welcome news is that there are over 100 million fewer children in child labour today than in 2000, even as the child population increased by 230 million over the same period and the report concluded that over the previous four years, the world had returned to a path of progress to end child labour but that progress needs to move faster and reach further. Even the gains made recently remain fragile given the risks of climate change, conflict, State fragility, economic instability and other global challenges.

How is it that this remains tolerated? The answer is complex. There are massive vested interests from governments to multi-nationals (some with assets greater than some countries’ gross domestic product) to global institutional investors all wishing for greater profits or advancement in which the exploitation of children is a part. There is public indifference (described recently by Tom Hanks as "the best petri dish for tyranny”) and a desire to continue to enjoy cheap goods and services without either realising or caring about their provenance. 

There is also the massive dilemma identified by UNICEF that if you ban children working by candlelight in the sweatshops of India and other countries you condemn them and their families to destitution – often this work, however badly paid, is the only source of income for those families. So, eradication of the evil needs to be more nuanced and alternative employment and income need to be found before ending the practice.

The vast majority of child labour (predominantly in agriculture) takes place in rural areas, though over half of it occurs in middle-income countries. An estimated 72.1% of working children are employed within their own family unit, making regulation and detection challenging.

My second theme is the practical approach of what can be done more than at present?

The problem of modern slavery is global so it needs a response from all states and 99 of the 193 UN member states (about 51%) have enacted some form of criminal legislation prohibiting slavery, while 94 countries (49%) have yet to fully criminalize it - so they do not explicitly criminalize slavery. Yet 185 states (96%) have international obligations to prohibit forced labour through the 1930 Forced Labour Convention or the International Covenant on Civil & Political Rights. While legal ownership of people was indeed abolished in all countries over the course of the last two centuries in many countries it has not been criminalised. In almost half of the world’s countries there is no criminal law penalising either slavery or the slave trade. In those 94 countries, you cannot be prosecuted and punished in a criminal court for enslaving another human being. On Human Trafficking while most countries have some anti-trafficking laws only a small percentage (less than 5% of 175 studied) fully align their national laws with international definitions.

Despite the panoply of international treaties these mostly lack associated adjudication mechanisms to ascertain whether countries or institutions are in breach of their obligations coupled with a lack of enforceability. the Chinese Government may assert that its treatment of the Uyghur is to counter terrorism and describe former mass internment camps as "vocational education and training centers" designed to teach Mandarin, impart job skills, and prevent citizens from being influenced by religious extremism but the only way to drive home the message to the Chinese Government is to challenge the purchase of goods. This is a problem because Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region produces roughly 20% of the world's cotton and accounts for 85% of Chinese production. As pointed out by the BBC, supply chains are difficult to tie down: retailers typically only know the first tier in their supply chain; a retailer commissions a shirt from a supplier, who buys the fabric from a mill, which buys the yarn from a spinning mill, which bought the cotton from a broker, who bought cotton from any number of farms. Yet that investigative work needs to be undertaken.

Collectively, UNICEF urges governments to scale up well-known policy imperatives: ensuring free and high-quality schooling to provide a viable alternative to working and support successful school-to-work transitions, stronger legal protections by aligning domestic laws with international standards to build the groundwork for effective prevention and enforcement and the provision of social safety nets by expanding social protection programs to reduce household economic vulnerability, which is a primary driver of child labour.  We can all lobby our own governments on these issues.

What can we do as individual citizens and civil society organisations? Everyone has a part to play either individually or collectively. We can urge our own governments to influence others. 

I realise that not everyone will have sympathy with the current President of the United States but only this month he has announced tariffs targeting countries that fail to ban goods made with forced labour. He has accused the UK of insufficiently examining its supply chains and is one of 60 countries facing levies of 10% or 12% on imports under the section 301 tariff. 

This year is the fiftieth anniversary of the historic shareholder resolution in the UK demanding that Midland Bank cease making new loans to the South African apartheid government which was presented at the bank’s Annual General Meeting (AGM) in March 1976. It set a precedent for further action which continues today in other shareholder meetings. Recently, I asked a question about the involvement of modern slavery at the AGM of the supermarket Sainsbury’s. 

Having domestic human trafficking legislation in place does not enable prosecution of forced labour, servitude or slavery as offences in domestic law. While the vast majority of states have domestic criminal provisions prohibiting trafficking, most have not yet looked beyond this to legislate against the full range of exploitation practices they have committed to prohibit.

Shockingly, as I mention above, research reveals that less than 5% of the 175 states that have undertaken legally-binding obligations to criminalise human trafficking have fully aligned their national law with the international definition of trafficking. This is because they have narrowly interpreted what constitutes human trafficking, creating only partial criminalisation of slavery.

As pointed out by Walk Free the Global Slavery Index, although the highest prevalence of forced labour is found in low-income countries, it is deeply connected to demand from higher-income countries so we have a role to play in the UK. As we know, an estimated 50 million people are living in modern slavery, an increase of 10 million people since 2016. That figure splits into 11m in India, 5.8m in China, 2.6m in North Korea and 2.3m in Pakistan. 

As President of Stop Human Trafficking Worldwide we have adopted a four-pronged approach. First, we must encourage or cajole all suppliers to undertake a rigorous examination of the pathway of their product so as to be satisfied that modern slavery has not been involved. This requires making a fuss with the CEOs of such producers, attending their annual general meetings and making the point and maybe even some demonstrations. We should not rest content until all products and services are labelled certifying “No Slavery Involved.”

Yet this will come only with the second prong of active public interest and engagement. Just as the anti-smoking advertisements have, in my lifetime, affected the incidence or smoking or the greater concern about drinking and driving or even the legislation about wearing seat-belts (all of which were opposed in their day) so we need to make the public aware and to feel concern sufficiently to change their attitude from indifference to one of active engagement. It is only when the shoppers are interested enough to discriminate against products that do not certify they are free of modern slavery will the producers take notice and respond by publishing either on the products or on their websites or their advertising that their products are compliant.

This requires a lot of mobilised activity and the first starting point is the third prong – those other organisations which are already taking action. There is no point in reinventing the wheel. Many NGOs both in the UK and internationally are now actively engaged in combatting trafficking and modern slavery and holding governments and other to account. We need to ensure that we are not duplicating their efforts but also we need to build solidarity and a coalition to ensure that our collective efforts are focused and not dissipated by too many trying to do the same thing. This involves a detailed examination of who is doing what and then seeking to co-ordinate and agree common courses of action so that maximum effect can be brought to bear.

The fourth prong is the involvement of parliamentary bodies and parliamentarians both domestically and globally for they are important component parts to the overall strategy to end modern slavery and trafficking. Experience shows that popular concern and involvement is often most effective in persuading parliamentarians to follow where the public leads. That is not to diminish the importance of involving legislatures where mere expressions of solidarity on opinion are newsworthy in themselves and where individual pieces of legislation can make a difference in behaviour. We should like to see legislation ultimately that requires the labelling of products as being free from modern slavery or even where some modern slavery may be suspected so that all consumers can know exactly what they are buying. We do not wish to put added costs and burdens on businesses so the voluntary adherence is to be tried first – but at least it would mean that this issue is alongside others of health and safety.

In the UK CCLA Investment Management has taken an initiative with its Modern Slavery Global Benchmark update. In 2025, they reviewed the public disclosures of 111 globally listed companies to evaluate their approach to finding, fixing and preventing modern slavery. Their report details their findings from that benchmarking process. Although they are pleased to see the breadth of companies reporting in line with global human rights legislation, they acknowledge that they will only get so far with transparency legislation (such as the Modern Slavery Act) combined with investor pressure. To effectively reduce the numbers of people in forced labour around the world, a suite of policy tools is required. CCLA supports the conclusion of the Joint Committee on Human Rights that ‘there is currently a piecemeal and ad hoc approach to addressing forced labour using domestic policy. They publish an annual update.

Lobbying government, taking shareholder action through resolutions and exercising our rights and capacity as individual purchasers of goods and services are all actions each and every one of us can take so that collectively as both national and global citizens we can work together to end the appalling exploitation of children and ensure that every child not only deserves but has in reality a safe childhood.

This article is based on a speech delivered by Keith Best at the Rights & Child Protection conference at International Internship University (IIU) on 12 June 2026.

Keith Best TD, MA is a former Conservative Member of Parliament (MP) for Anglesey/Ynys Môn and served as the Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Secretary of State for Wales. Major in airborne and commando (artillery) forces, practising barrister, liveryman (Loriner), and Freeman of the City of London, Keith was named one of the 100 most influential people in public services in the UK by Society Guardian. Keith has made significant contributions to international refugee and human rights initiatives, including serving as Vice Chair of the European Council on Refugees and Exiles and as a member of the Foreign Secretary’s Advisory Panel on Torture Prevention. He is the Chair & CEO of the Wyndham Place Charlemagne Trust, Chair of the Universal Peace Federation (UK), patron of TEAM Global, and a trustee of several national and international organisations. 

The views and opinions expressed in our International Insights are strictly those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views, policies, or positions of TEAM Global or its affiliates.