Cocoa Protocol: Helping to End Child Labor in West Africa September 17, 2009

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Complete video at: http://fora.tv/2009/09/09/RIGHTS_Kevin_Bales_on_Ending_Slavery_and_Human_Trafficking

Kevin Bales, author of The Slave Next Door, discusses how the Cocoa Protocol is helping to eradicate child labor in West Africa's cocoa industry. "It's the first time in history that an entire industry has decided to take complete moral responsibility, and financial, for their product chain," says Bales.

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Kevin Bales is presenting at Momentum 2009 on the Rights plenary: At the heart of our invocation of rights lies a belief in our shared humanity. Our society can reach its fullest potential only if everyone is at the table. How can we enact a truly inclusive social contract?

This plenary explores how to confront and dismantle punitive policies that alienate those outside centers of power.

Bales' momentum: "We can end slavery, the laws are in place, the economics work, there is no debate -- everyone agrees it should end. All it takes is a good hard shove and it goes over the brink of its own extinction. Imagine being able to give our kids a world without slavery." - Momentum Conference

Going undercover to meet slaves and slaveholders, Kevin Bales exposed how modern slavery penetrates the global economy and flows into the things we buy. Named by Utne Reader as a "visionary who is changing your world;" and the originator of one of "100 World-Changing Discoveries" by the Association of British Universities, he is a leading abolitionist in the anti-slavery movement. In 2001 he founded Free the Slaves, the American sister organization of the UKs Anti-Slavery International, the worlds oldest human rights group. In eight years it has helped to liberate thousands of slaves in India, Nepal, Haiti, Ghana, Brazil, Ivory Coast, and Bangladesh, and worked with them to build new lives of dignity.