Legislation tackling modern slavery is clearly spreading around the world, placing varying obligations on companies over a certain threshold (and individuals within companies) to report, disclose, mitigate, and remediate risks and instances of modern slavery in local and complex domestic and global supply and value chains. This legislation targets medium to large companies as they are often the producer of goods and services tainted by human rights violations, with penalties for breaches and failure to notify. This session will examine the current and predicted future of modern slavery legislation, the obligations it places on multinational organizations, the technological solutions available to companies and their legal advisors to comply with such obligations and jurisdictional and cultural differences in the implementation and the enforcement of such obligations. In particular, this session will demonstrate how AI solutions will revolutionize both the visualization of  human rights violations and drafting of contracts to assist  in- house, corporate, human rights, employment and criminal lawyers and their clients in complying with these new statutory duties- noting that this technology can apply to other legal/ social issues like environmental ones.  

Points to be covered include:
1.    Current statistics on modern slavery across regions

• revisiting the numbers e.g. number of potential modern slavery victims in England and Wales hits record high and report on Global Estimates of Modern Slavery: Forced Labour and Forced Marriage 
• revisiting where the risks lie – the Global Slavery Index Report 2023: Resources | Walk Free [walkfree.org]

2.    Update on the maturation of existing modern slavery laws and advocacy: California Transparency Act 2008, UK Modern Slavery Act 2015, Australia Modern Slavery Act 2015, France 2017, Brazil’s Lista Suja (‘Dirty List’).

3.    Consideration of newer modern slavery laws (both passed and proposed) eg. Canada (with  far reaching powers, and criminal liability), Netherlands, Switzerland Conflict Minerals and Child Labour Due Diligence Ordinance, Norwegian Transparency Act 2022, Germany - Supply Chain Due Diligence Act, Spain draft bill, EU Directive, and consideration of laws in Asia/Africa/South America.

4.    Modern slavery risk in M & A transactions