GENEVA – Fifty million people were living in modern slavery last year, according to a new joint report from the International Labour Organization (ILO), Walk Free and the International Organisation for Migration (IOM).
The report says that 28 million were in forced labour and another 22 million trapped in forced marriage, and that the total of people in modern slavery had risen by 10 million in the last five years.
The 131-page report makes no direct mention of the Xinjiang region of China where more than a million Uyghur Muslims have been incarcerated with many allegedly forced to work in the cotton industry which supplies a fifth of global demand.
