About Anti Slavery International
Anti-Slavery, the world's oldest international organisation, was established in 1839 with the specific objective of ending slavery throughout the world. Despite its many successful campaigns, slavery continues to exist in the 21st century. Anti-Slavery's work is divided among three teams, to enable it to work effectively towards achieving its goal of a slave-free world.
Programme
The Programme Team works with partner organisations around the world collecting information on the issues central to its work: debt bondage, forced labour, forced marriage, the worst forms of child labour, traditional slavery and the trafficking of men, women and children. The team publishes this information and works through international bodies to promote laws to protect those exploited by these practices.
Communication
The Communications Team comprises campaign, education and press officers who produce action briefings, educational materials and a magazine the Reporter, to inform both the public and policy makers about slavery issues around the world. Anti-Slavery lobbies national governments, the United Nations, and the European Union to adopt policies which will help to bring about the end of all forms of slavery.
Information
The Information Team includes fundraising, the reference library and archive. The finances raised from the public, charitable trusts, foundations, governments, the European Union and other institutions are critical to the organisation's ability to work towards the elimination of slavery. The library's collection of books, reports, journals, photographs, lantern slides, microfilm, video and press cuttings date from the early days of the abolitionist movement to the present.
Anti-Slavery's work has produced real change. Throughout the 20th century, Anti-Slavery was involved in many successful campaigns, such as those to stop the abuse of rubber workers in the Belgian Congo. One recent success involved a video on child domestics in the Philippines - Out of Sight, Out of Mind - produced with one of its partners, Visayan Forum. Shown countrywide and in Congress the film led to the drafting of a new law to protect child domestic workers.
Our history
Anti-Slavery International is the world's oldest human rights organisation. Its roots stretch back to 1787 when the first abolitionist society was formed. This broad-based society was at the forefront of the movements to abolish the slave trade (achieved in Britain in 1807) as well as slavery throughout the British colonies (achieved in 1833).
But abolition did not mean instant freedom for slaves. Instead, they had to continue serving the same masters under a system many considered an alternative form of slavery: 'apprenticeship'. This lasted between six and 12 years, during which many were severely beaten. Growing public pressure led Parliament to abolish apprenticeships on August 1, 1838, three years before the date set by the Emancipation Act. This early example of non-governmental organisation demonstrated the power of popular pressure for political change.
A year later the abolition campaign was expanded. A new organisation, the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society formed on April 17, 1839, declared its commitment to abolishing slavery throughout the world. This organisation continues today under the name Anti-Slavery International. The organisation's early leaders included Sir Thomas Foxwell Buxton, Thomas Clarkson and other notable Quakers, Baptists and Methodists.
By the 1890s the Society's mandate included the ill treatment of indigenous peoples, leading it in 1909 to merge with the Aborigines' Protection Society.
The Anti-Slavery and Aborigines' Protection Society played a key role in campaigning for and drafting the 1926 Convention on the Abolition of Slavery and the 1956 Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, the Slave Trade and Institutions and Practices Similar to Slavery. In 1975, it worked for the creation of a group of experts within the United Nations dedicated to the elimination of slavery, now called the UN Working Group on Contemporary Forms of Slavery.
In 1990 the Society changed its name to Anti-Slavery International, also known as Anti-Slavery. Its main areas of work currently include forced and bonded labour, the worst forms of child labour, trafficking of human beings and traditional or 'chattel' slavery.