Mark P. Lagon

Bio: Mark P. Lagon is an academic researcher from Stanford University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Debt & Human rights. The author has an hindex of 2, co-authored 2 publications receiving 7 citations.

Trafficking and Human Dignity

Abstract: HUMAN TRAFFICKING IS the slavery of our time. Exactly 200 years ago, Britain and the United States formally outlawed the transatlantic slave trade. A few decades later the practice of slavery was expunged from North American (with a heavy dose of justice enforced by the British Navy and of bloodshed in the American Civil War). While much has changed since the days of the transatlantic slave trade, the lie which fueled that horrific chapter in history is at the root of sex trafficking and slave labor today--a belief that some people are less than human. Consider Carlo, a 27-year-old man from a rural area of the Philippines, recruited along with ten other men and women for a highly valued job in an American Midwestern hotel. The men were promised higher wages, reasonable hours, and benefits. Filipino recruiters charged each worker $1,200 as a "processing fee" for securing the jobs. Hotel mangers added new non-negotiable charges for "rent." This debt was used to coerce Carlo and the others to work endless hours. Carlo's passport was confiscated by the traffickers to keep him from fleeing, which also rendered him undocumented and subject to potential arrest and deportation if caught by immigration officials off hotel premises. Toiling for 16 to 18 hours a day, Carlo and the other Filipinos endured total control by hotel managers over every aspect of their lives--what they ate, where they lived, and the hours they worked. Debt bondage CARLO'S STORY INCLUDES several threads which I increasingly see in my work at the State Department's Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons Carlo is a migrant. His nightmare began at the hands of a recruiter who used fraudulent offers of employment and extracted a large recruitment fee which Carlo could only pay by taking a loan. Carlo was uniquely vulnerable to exploitation once in the destination country, the U.S., due to the debt he carried as a direct result of recruitment. This home-country debt exacerbated by fraudulent expenses, such as "rent," added by an exploitative U.S. employer. Carlo's debt led to debt bondage. Lacking any form of power, not to mention identification, in a country not his own, Carlo was robbed of his dignity as a victim of forced labor. Current trends fleshed out in the 2008 Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report released by the Secretary of State in June, and produced by my office, paint a grim picture of the diffuse and diverse factors which contribute to the vulnerability of more than 175 million migrants in the world today--vulnerability not just to minor labor infractions but to gross exploitation. Among these factors is the flagrant use of excessive debt as a tool of manipulation, the fraudulent practices of some middle-men brokering the movement of millions across international borders, weak laws--and weak enforcement of laws--governing labor exploitation, some aspects of sponsorship laws in Persian Gulf states, and a fundamental lack of understanding about human trafficking. Debt bondage is a frequent form of forced labor. Too often, people are enticed into fraudulent offers of work abroad that require a steep payment up front for the services of a labor agency arranging the job or a payment that goes straight to the future employer. To pay such fees, workers in poorer counties either become indebted to the recruiter, or take out a formal or informal loan in their country of origin, with the expectation of payment based on future wages earned abroad. Often, worker expectations and repayment terms are based on exaggerated and false representations by recruiters regarding wages the workers can expect to earn in their new jobs. Once at an overseas worksite, such high levels of indebtedness can make workers vulnerable to exploitation by unscrupulous employers who subject workers to terms much less favorable than promised at the time of recruitment (such as much longer hours, less pay, and harsher conditions). …

Conservatives, Liberals, and Human Rights

Abstract: WHEN THE AMERICAN section of Amnesty International was first founded in the 1970s, William F. Buckley was one of its earliest supporters. The prime mover behind the American section, Ginetta Sagan, was a mentor to those of all political stripes, including, for example, Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, whom no one has ever accused of being a "leftist." When George W. Bush called in his second inaugural address for the United States to affirm "the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world," he was issuing a call with which no human rights advocate could possibly disagree. The board of Freedom House, a prominent human rights organization, is rife with ex-Bush administration officials like William H. Taft IV and Paula J. Dobriansky, and with scholars like Ruth Wedgwood and Joshua Muravchik who are generally identified with the conservative end of the political spectrum. And yet, despite the political diversity these instances represent, human rights are generally identified as a left-wing cause. There are many reasons for that, perhaps foremost among them the fact that human rights standards are established largely by international instruments, beginning with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (udhr), and enforced, to the extent to which they are "enforced" at all, by international institutions, such as the UN Human Rights Council. Conservatives tend to resist subsuming American sovereignty to international regimens and to be suspicious of international institutions, in part because they include some member states lacking consent of the governed and basic liberties.1 As a consequence, the United States has ratified fewer key human rights treaties than the other G 20 nations and, when it has ratified them, has tended to attach reservations asserting the preeminent authority of the U.S. Constitution. (2) Moreover, human rights have come to be associ ated with a number of causes--notably opposition to the death penalty; the closure of the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay; and the assertion of a right to health care--that, justifiably or not, are considered liberal causes in American political terms. The fact that conservatives have played a prominent role in other landmark human rights struggles--such as the promotion of religious freedom; an end to the second Sudanese Civil War in 2005; and the campaign to end human trafficking--has failed to redress the perception that human rights advocates, with the exception perhaps of a handful of neoconservatives, are ineluctably drawn from the left. As human rights figures identified with different parts of the political arc, we regret this bias because it does damage to the human rights cause. Michael Ignatieff has called human rights the "lingua franca of global moral thought," but moral thought is not the exclusive province of any one political position. Just as the standing of human rights claims declines if those claims are thought to be no more than the product of Western ideology or a so-called imperialist agenda, so too the power of human rights to influence U.S. foreign and domestic policies is diminished if human rights are perceived to be the concern of only one segment of the political community. When, on the contrary, a group of respected military leaders speak out against torture or former Bush Solicitor General Ted Olson pleads the case for marriage equality, stereotypes of what human rights advocates look like are constructively confounded. When conservative Republican Alberto Mora resigned as counsel general of the Department of the Navy over detainee policy, he did not suddenly become a liberal. The truth is that human rights champions do not come in one size that fits all, nor do they agree with one another on all issues. The late Democratic Congressman Tom Lantos, whose support for human rights was so widely recognized that the Human Rights Commission of the U.S. House of Representatives is named for him, could become irate at criticism of the United States by human rights organizations for its use of the death penalty. …

Slavery: annual bibliographical supplement (2008)

Abstract: For 2008 the bibliography continues its customary coverage of secondary writings published since 1900 in western European languages on slavery or the slave trade anywhere in the world: monographs, ...

Business and Human Trafficking: A Social Connection and Political Responsibility Model:

Abstract: Human trafficking is one of the most lucrative international criminal activities and is widespread across a variety of industries. The response to human trafficking in corporate supply chains has b...

Bonhoeffer and universal health care as a human right.

Abstract: Bonhoeffer gave a theocentric basis for human rights, as God is the ground of ethics. In our earthly world, the “ultimate” must be prepared by what is “penultimate.” That includes humanity’s natural life and bodily wholeness, leading to human duties crafted by human reason. Nowadays, biblical texts should not be used as partisan weapons attacking government provision of health care, since all Scripture (even the Law) is seen as a Christ-centered focus on human redemption. Thus, Bonhoeffer implies a right to universal health care, but leaves entirely open which practical structures may best provide it.