The Current

The anti-slavery cause got a huge boost last week when a prestigious advisory group to President Obama released comprehensive recommendations on ending trafficking at home and abroad.  The report was produced by the President’s Advisory Council on Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships.  The Council is a group of faith leaders who are appointed for one year to advise the president on public policies of particular concern to people of faith. 

This year’s leadership group first met to discuss trafficking in July 2012 and spent the next eight months educating themselves and crafting recommendations.  IJM was honored to be included in consultations with the Council and delighted with the recommendations that Council Chair Susie Stern presented to President Obama last week Tuesday. 

I met Ms. Stern at an event to launch the report. She told me that when she put it in President Obama’s hands she told him something she had learned from IJM’s Gary Haugen:  “Slaves are by definition the most powerless people on earth.  Therefore the only agency we have to represent them, the State Department’s TIP Office, must have maximum authority to speak for them.”

Susie Stern and her team, with the able assistance of Mara Vanderslice Kelly from the President’s Office, assembled a report that manages to be simultaneously aspirational and practical.  It is a robust blueprint for President Obama’s second term.  Among the provisions that mean the most to me are the following: 

• Combatting human trafficking requires funding appropriate to the scale of the crime…The anti-trafficking field, inside and outside of government, has matured significantly and is ready to absorb an exponential increase of investments needed to combat such a pervasive global evil.
• The Council appreciates and acknowledges not only the diplomacy and monitoring carried out by the State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons (J/TIP), but the level of expertise and innovation the office brings to the anti-trafficking movement.  Elevate the Department of State’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons (J/TIP) to a Bureau to increase its ability to lead the global effort to end modern slavery

These are exactly some of the requests that we and you have been making of the U.S. government over the past several years. To see them drawn out by faith leaders as critical needs in the fight against trafficking and given directly to the president is a great encouragement indeed.

These and other recommendations are echoed in a letter to President Obama circulated by IJM and signed by 50,000 Americans that we plan to deliver to the White House in early May. There’s still time to sign your name or ask your friends to sign.

Read the full report from the President’s Advisory Council here.