At this year's Clinton Global Initiative summit, President Obama made an impassioned plea for the international community to crack down on trafficking, calling the end of human trafficking is “one of the great human rights causes of our time.” He detailed a number of concrete steps to help identify victims of human trafficking and to reduce the levels of this crime throughout the United States and globally.
In his speech he cited the commonly-held statistic that 20 million people worldwide are victims of human trafficking, including children forced to work at sweatshops and women pushed into the sex trade. He stated that human trafficking “must be called by its true name: modern slavery.”
“It is barbaric and it is evil and it has no place in civilized world,” Obama told his audience at the Sheraton New York Hotel and Towers in Midtown Manhattan. “Human trafficking is not a business model, it’s a crime, and we’re going to stop it” he said. “We are our brothers’ keepers and our sisters’ keepers.”
We commend President Obama for keeping this critical issue at the very forefront of our national and global conversation.
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