UN Executive Director Ghada Waly speaks on human trafficking
On 30 January 2025, Nuffield Professorial Fellows Andrew Thompson and Desmond King hosted a talk by Ghada Waly, Executive Director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and Director General of the United Nations Office in Vienna, in College.
The keynote speech focused on the pressing and neglected issue of human trafficking and modern slavery. The Director General emphasized how patterns of exploitation are currently changing and expanding beyond forced labour within supply chains to increasingly include forced sexual exploitation, forced criminality and child soldiering. She also spoke about the centrality of social networks in co-opting victims and the pivotal facilitating role played by loose labour regulations in 'Special Economic Zones' (SEZs).
Ghada concluded her talk by stressing the importance of the UN’s strategic and coordinating role in global responses to and prevention of trafficking, the need to empower survivors as advocates of more effective anti-trafficking legislation, and the critical role of academia in evaluating and improving these policies.
The keynote was followed by responses from MP and Former Secretary for International Development Andrew Mitchell and former Nuffield Non-Stipendiary Research Fellow Zora Hauser (2022-24; now at the University of Cambridge). External guests included former British Prime Minister Baroness Theresa May, Chairperson of the Global Commission on Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking.
More information about previous work at Nuffield in this area can be found at the International NGOs and the Long Humanitarian Century project page.