The Secretary-General of the United Nations, António Guterres, called on governments and societies to recommit to ending slavery. He urged all countries to protect and uphold the rights of slavery victims and survivors.
The United Nations defines contemporary slavery as trafficking in persons, sexual exploitation, the worst forms of child labour, forced marriage and the forced recruitment of children for use in armed conflict.
The Secretary-General emphasized that the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans continues to reverberate to this day, the thing that scarred societies and impeded equitable development.
The past year 2021 has seen about 50 million people enslaved, and the number is growing according to the latest global estimates of modern forms of slavery in bonded labour and forced marriage.
UN statistics show that an estimated 50 million people live in modern slavery, including 28 million in forced labour and 22 million in forced marriage.
Furthermore, Nearly one in eight of all slave labourers are children, which is more than half of those are exposed to commercial sexual exploitation practices, and Four out of five of them are women or girls.