Slavery conviction upheld
The extraordinary struggle of five survivors of human trafficking and sexual slavery culminated last week in victory in Australia's highest court. After years of legal wrangling, six judges of the High Court upheld a brothel owner's conviction and 10-year goal sentence for slavery.
A police raid on a legal brothel in inner Melbourne in 2003 resulted in the owner, Wei Tang (pictured right), being charged with ten slavery-related offences, a test of Australia's 1999 anti-slavery legislation. Convicted on all counts, she successfully appealed in the Victorian Supreme Court in 2007.
Five of her victims, Thai women enslaved for between 2 weeks and 10 months each, "courageously testified in each [court] case," remaining in "virtual limbo for all these years," says their lawyer, Hui Zhou. They described being forced to have sex with between 800 and 900 men, six-days-a-week without pay in order to fulfill a 'contract'. They could earn spending money only if they continued to work on their day off.
The High Court found that agreeing to come to Australia for prostitution "is not equal to consent to enslavement or the conditions of slavery."
Eighty per cent of internationally trafficked persons are women and girls, according to the US State Department's authoritative Trafficking in Persons Report. This modern form of slavery affects "millions of people every year . . . in nearly every country in the world."
The UN lists Australia as the 10th main destination for human trafficking, with growing demand for Asian women and girls for the sex industry. Project Respect, Australia’s leading anti-trafficking and slavery NGO, estimates that 1,000 women are trafficked into Australia every year for prostitution, mostly from Thailand and South Korea. People have also been trafficked to Australia to work in hospitality and construction.
Project Respect advocates a rights-based approach to combating trafficking and slavery.
This landmark case makes way for further prosecutions in Australia. Meanwhile, Wei Tang will appeal the length of her sentence.
The ABC’s Radio National covered the Wei Tang case in The Law Report on 2 Sept. To quote Damien Carrick’s interview [edited] with Jennifer Burn, director of the Anti-Slavery Project at University of Technology, Sydney:
DC: So what important principles can be pulled from the decision?
JB: . . . that slavery can be evidenced in a number of ways, and these criteria include whether there has been restriction over a person’s autonomy or freedom of choice or freedom of movement; whether there’s been psychological control; partial or total control over a person’s personal belongings; whether there have been any measures to prevent or deter a person from escape, and whether there’s been threat or force or coercion and whether there’s been violence [in] the relationship between the accused and the person over whom the powers have been exercised.
DC: And the court was satisfied that in this situation, the five women who were working for Wei Tang, those criteria were satisfied?
JB: That’s absolutely the case.
DC: Is there a danger that our definitions of slavery are becoming too broad and not acknowledging that there is this whole range of employment relations around?
JB: The High Court made it absolutely clear that harsh employment conditions are not necessarily slavery. A bad job, poor pay, long hours, doesn’t mean that a person is necessarily enslaved, and I think that there is not going to be an expansion of claims of slavery that would arise out of poor working conditions alone.
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/lawreport/stories/2008/2351551.htm