Vice President Joe Biden will address modern-day slavery: Human trafficking on agenda for U.S. vice president’s trip to Moldova, Russia:
U.S. Vice President Joe Biden plans to address the issue of human trafficking on his visit to Moldova and Russia next week, a White House official said Friday.
“That is a subject I am quite certain he will bring up,” said U.S. National Security Advisor to the Vice President Tony Blinken.
“It’s an issue that this administration is very focused on, has deep concerns about and is something that we bring up when relevant wherever we go, so I expect it will be on his agenda,” he said on a conference call with reporters Friday, in response to a question from Xinhua.
Here’s an interesting story out of Hong Kong: A group of wealthy, corporate professionals take their business acumen, and apply it to ending slavery. Asia One has a feature on The Mekong Club, an exclusive band of moneymakers, whose mission is to marry “the strengths of the private sector with the expertise of the counter trafficking community.”
The article quotes Matthew Friedman, regional manager for the UN’s Inter-Agency Project on Human Trafficking (UNIAP): “Trafficking happens within the realm of bad business, of rotten business. So who better to address fixing this than the private sector?”
Here is the article, (via Asia One):
From Boardroom Battles to Beating Slavery
An estimated 9.5 million people across Asia are victims of human traffickers. Now a United Nations team is enlisting wealthy professionals from Hong Kong to help tackle the misery of modern-day slavery and sexual exploitation, reports Simon Parry.
By day, they are among Hong Kong’s most high-powered professionals – bankers, accountants, lawyers and telecom professionals who command stratospheric salaries and look out at Victoria Harbour from boardrooms high in the city’s most imposing skyscrapers.
Outside office hours, however, they have a very different mission. They’re preparing to become secret agents who will use their expertise, their contacts, their resources and their brainpower to fight the scourge of human trafficking which claims millions of victims across Asia.
The wretched lives of the trafficked people the “city slickers” have pledged to help could hardly be more different than their own. But already dozens of executives have agreed to use their considerable influence to combat an evil that destroys lives across the region.
These necessarily anonymous executives are the first members of the Mekong Club – a newly formed group set up by a United Nations task force to harness the financial muscle, brain power and expertise of Hong Kong professionals into the war on human trafficking.
At a series of meetings earlier in February, executives from five major legal companies and three telecom companies as well as large financial brokerages pledged support to the project which will provide finance and brain power to help bring traffickers to justice.
When it begins its work in earnest, the Mekong Club is expected to parachute top lawyers in to tackle court cases around the region, to draw on the financial expertise of its members to trace traffickers’ cash trails, and to use telecom experts to set up trans-border hotlines for victims.