Crimes Legislation Amendment (Slavery, Slavery-like Conditions and People Trafficking) Bill 2012 Passes Senate

The Crimes Legislation Amendment (Slavery, Slavery-like Conditions and People Trafficking) Bill 2012 passed the Senate yesterday in a historic move to comprehensively criminalise all forms of slavery and people trafficking.

The purpose of the Bill is to ensure that the broadest range of exploitative behaviour is captured and criminalised, including by introducing new offences of forced labour, forced marriage, and harbouring a victim, and by clarifying existing offences and their definitions to enhance operational effectiveness. The Bill also increases the availability of reparation orders to individual victims of Commonwealth offences, including people trafficking.

In summary, the Bill:

• establishes new offences in the Criminal Code of forced labour, forced marriage, organ trafficking, and harbouring a victim

• ensures the slavery offence applies to conduct which renders a person a slave, as well as conduct involving a person who is already a slave

• extends the application of the existing offences of deceptive recruiting and sexual servitude so they apply to non-sexual servitude and all forms of deceptive recruiting

• increases the penalties applicable to the existing debt bondage offences, to ensure they are in line with the serious nature of the offences

• broadens the definition of exploitation under the Criminal Code to include all slavery-like practices

• amends the existing definitions to ensure the broadest range of exploitative conduct is criminalised by the offences, including psychological oppression and the abuse of power or taking advantage of a person’s vulnerability, and

• improve the availability of reparations to victims.

As stated by Professor Burn, director of Anti-Slavery Australia,

"The International Labour Organisation says there are 21.9 million people in forced labour situations around the world, mostly in the Asia Pacific but certainly in Australia too...We haven’t had a stand alone offence of forced labour until the bill was passed today."

Read more about the effect of the proposed law.

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