Anti-Trafficking Law as a key to Global Economic Contradictions: A Response to Janie Chuang

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Anti-trafficking law, with its rapid ascent to public visibility since the establishment of the Palermo Protocol fifteen years ago, offers a highly salient framework for understanding, and addressing, human exploitation. Yet this framework, as Professor Janie Chuang brilliantly illustrates in her article, Exploitation Creep and the Un-making of Human Trafficking Law,1 has proven both over-inclusive and, simultaneously and problematically, under-inclusive in its endeavors.The anti-trafficking framework is broad enough to have overlapped substantially with potentially competing legal and institutional regimes through the “exploitation creep” that Chuang identifies—regimes that ban, re-spectively, forced labor (“Creep 1”) and slavery (“Creep 2”). If brought to fruition, Chuang’s exposition suggests, the effect of anti-trafficking’s exploitation creep may be to marginalize the positive international law of forced labor and slavery treaties, and perhaps even to render them entirely superfluous.