U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder is speaking out against modern-day slavery, saying it’s “urgent” to “more successfully identify, assist, and seek justice on behalf of the millions of human trafficking victims who have been trapped in some form of slavery, bonded labor, or forced prostitution.”
He spoke Tuesday evening in Little Rock, Arkansas at the Clinton School of Public Service.
“It is alarming, and almost unfathomable,” Holder noted, “to consider that – 150 years since President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation; more than six decades after the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights prohibited the practice of slavery on a global scale; and nearly a dozen years from the day that, with President Clinton’s approval, the landmark Trafficking Victims Protection Act became law – today, in communities across and beyond this country, slavery persists.”
Holder noted it was fitting that his remarks came during National Crime Victims Rights Week.
“Without question,” Holder said, slavery has reached “crisis proportions.” For his full remarks, click here.