Does “”Freedom”” Mean Freedom From Slavery?

Freedom House released its ratings in January on the status of freedom in countries around the world. The ratings produced the usual smug smiles from those highly rated and the usual whining and wailing from governments criticized. But no one has commented on a gap in the annual report that has been evident for years. Once again, as in the past, there is no mention of how countries are doing in fighting the antithesis of freedom: slavery.

Look at this and other recent Freedom House reports and nowhere can you find mention of modern day slavery or its preferred euphemism: human trafficking.

Should it matter? Yes. Freedom House is probably the most respected and venerable organization in the world reporting on freedom. Founded by Wendell Wilkie and Eleanor Roosevelt in the early 1940s, Freedom House has unwaveringly raised the standard of freedom in evaluating fascist countries, Communist regimes, and plain old, dictatorial thugocracies. Its annual rankings are read and used in the United Nations and other international organizations, as well as by the U.S. State Department.

Policy and aid decisions are influenced by Freedom House’s report. Those fighting for freedom in countries lacking it are encouraged or discouraged by what Freedom House’s report covers. And sometimes — most importantly — their governments are moved to greater effort. So it is no small matter when Freedom House looks carefully at civil rights and liberties but ignores one of the worst and most obvious abuses of liberty.

Would consideration of what efforts countries are making to abolish modern day slavery affect the Freedom House evaluations? Surely. Let’s take just two examples: India and Germany.

India is the world’s most populous democracy and it is certainly free in many respects. Yet millions of Indians (and many immigrants from neighboring countries such as Nepal) are enslaved in the brothels of India’s largest cities or by a bonded labor system in rice mills, quarries, and carpet factories in the countryside.

Many are children who have been sold. These people live with no pay or education, scant food or clothing, endure beatings, and cannot move to another job. Slavery is closely tied to India’s caste system, which oppresses around 250 million people, meaning that a significant percentage of the population is by no means free.

Worse still, the federal government of India, while making some efforts to combat sex slavery, is doing almost nothing and is in complete denial about bonded labor slavery.

On the other side of the margin sits Germany, which gets Freedom House’s highest ratings in every category that the organization uses. Rightly cited as an example of Western European democracy, Germany finds itself taking on an impossible task: promoting its sex trade while fighting the human trafficking of hundreds of thousands of foreign women and girls that come to Germany for that very same sex trade.

Germany merits an overall high ranking, but its inaction to counter demand for sex slaves is appalling. It is naïve to believe that the over two hundred and fifty thousand foreigners in Germany’s sex trade are truly free. But Germany continues to claim it is fighting slavery even as it props up that hideous institution.

Freedom House, which favors traditional democracies, need not worry that its ratings will be turned upside down by including modern day slavery in its indices. Totalitarian and authoritarian countries, on the whole, have more slavery than democracies and do less to combat it. Yet where Freedom House’s index fails most miserably is in rating democratic countries, where surface freedom can be an illusion for many.

The reason for this seeming contradiction is that democracies give great rights and liberties to their citizens but not necessarily to others living there. Citizenship in ancient Greece conveyed liberty on the Greeks but not on the “barbarians” captured abroad and enslaved in Athens.

Citizenship in the old American South conveyed liberty on white Southerners but not on those taken from Africa and enslaved on the cotton plantations. Germany, the Netherlands, and many other Western European countries honor the rights and liberties of their citizens but minimize those of foreigners who are enslaved in their sex industries or forced labor.

What Freedom House has constructed is an index that measures the freedom of the free. If you are a slave, you do not count in the Freedom House index. More importantly, the efforts of those attempting to save you in your adopted country are not weighed in Freedom House’s ratings. This approach may reflect the thinking of Aristotle but not of Frederick Douglass.

Freedom House might argue that it cannot evaluate modern day slavery since no government today has laws sanctioning slavery, and most have laws banning the practice. But this argument would contradict the premise of most of Freedom House’s report. When it assesses political rights and civil liberties in countries, Freedom House looks not just at the existence or absence of laws, but how the laws are implemented and enforced.

Freedom House should take the same approach with modern-day slavery and ask some of the following questions:

• Are the victims helped or punished?
• Are civil and religious groups who fight modern day slavery merely tolerated or encouraged?
• Is the society that creates the demand for slaves being educated so as to reduce demand?

These are questions that are already being asked by the U.S. State Department and many abolitionist organizations. Modern-day slavery is emerging as a premier human-rights and freedom issue of the 21st century. The illustrious organization with “freedom” in its name can no longer afford to look the other way.

John R. Miller, a research professor at the George Washington University’s Elliott School, and a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute, was director of the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons in the U.S. State Department from 2002-2006.