Special Action Programme to Combat Forced Labour

The Special Action Programme to Combat Forced Labour (SAP-FL) is the International Labour Organization (ILO) Programme combating forced labour and related issues. SAP-FL strives to provide evidence-based policy advice, tools and services to enable governments, employers’ and workers’ organizations and other partners to take effective, coordinated and rights-based action to prevent and eradicate forced labour. SAP-FL indicates that all human trafficking leads to forced labour.

SAP-FL advocates and communicates so that policy makers and the public become aware of forced labour, the harm it causes to men, women and children, and what they can do to combat it.

Their work at global level is complemented by field-based operational projects which set out to develop, test and demonstrate the effectiveness of a distinct ILO approach to combating different manifestations of forced labour and human trafficking.

ILO Forced Labour Convention, 1930 (No. 29), provides a general prohibition of the use of forced labour admitting only five exceptions to it. Its object and purpose is to suppress the use of forced labour in all its forms irrespective of the nature of the work or the sector of activity in which it may be performed.

ILO Abolition of Forced Labour Convention, 1957 (No. 105), supplements Convention No. 29 by defining specific circumstances under which forced labour is never allowed.

The use of forced labour is now almost universally banned, since the Conventions Nos. 29 and 105 are the most widely ratified of all ILO Conventions with 177 and 172 ratifications respectively.

The 1998 ILO Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work commits ILO member states to respect, promote and realize the principle of the elimination of all forms of forced labour as one of the four fundamental principles, even if they have not ratified the forced labour Conventions.

The article 2 of Convention No. 29 defines [forced labour] as:

"all work or service which is exacted from any person under the menace of any penalty and for which the said person has not offered himself voluntarily."

The key elements of this definition are:

...
Wikipedia