In April, our founder Kailash Satyarthi met with representatives of the US government as part of our ongoing work to accelerate an end to child labor.
Meetings in DC with the Biden Administration resulted in a request from the Deputy National Security Advisor, Daleep Singh, to KSCF US to provide draft text on child labor, social protection, and child trafficking and sexual abuse for the G7 Leaders’ Summit hosted by Germany in June. All areas made it into the final Leaders’ Communiqué, explicitly committing the Group of 7 to tackle child labor for the first time.
The relevant sections of the Communiqué are:
We are committed to tackling child labour, and to ensuring decent work, including fair wages, working closely with the private sector. We are concerned by the use of all forms of forced labour in global supply chains, including state-sponsored forced labour of vulnerable groups and minorities, including in the agricultural, solar, and garment sectors. We agree on the importance of upholding human rights and of international labour standards, including those deriving from International Labour Organisation (ILO) membership, throughout global supply chains and tackling instances of forced labour. We commit to accelerating progress including through our own available domestic means and multilateral institutions with a view to remove all forms of forced labour from global supply chains, including state-sponsored forced labour. We commit to taking measures to strengthen our cooperation and collective efforts towards eradicating the use of all forms of forced labour in global supply chains, including through increased transparency and business risk advisories, and other measures to address forced labour globally…
…we will accelerate progress towards universal, adequate, adaptive, shock-responsive, and inclusive social protection for all by 2030 in line with the UN Secretary-General’s initiative for a “Global Accelerator on Jobs and Social Protection for a Just Transition”, which aims to create 400 million jobs and to extend social protection….
The pandemic, the war against Ukraine and further international conflicts, including in Afghanistan, have exacerbated the threat of trafficking in human beings, aimed at sexual and labour exploitation and abuse, particularly of children and women. We commit to step up our fight against trafficking in human beings and our efforts to prevent and combat child sexual abuse and exploitation globally, both online and offline. We ask our Interior Ministers to take forward the implementation of the Action plan to combat Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse from September 2021.
READ THE COMMUNIQUÉ IN FULL HERE