Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney has been a friend to me, long before I arrived to Polaris Project.  My heart reaches out to her, a titan of the anti-human trafficking cause, as she mourns the passing of her husband. [Read more →]

My last blog was about the 9th annual global Trafficking in Persons Report rolled out this week by the Secretary of State.   One of the most important aspects of the rollout is not the Report.  It’s the concurrent Report on the fight against human trafficking within the United States compiled by the Attorney-General. [Read more →]

This week Secretary of State Clinton and my successor as anti-trafficking ambassador, former anti-slavery prosecutor Luis CdeBaca, rolled out the annual Trafficking in Persons Report. The rollout embodied the bipartisan and inter-branch support of the anti-slavery issue which I experienced as ambassador. This report is an invaluable tool to nudge and prod other governments to improve their records fighting slavery. Whether they had a welcoming or grousing response, governments focused on their anti-trafficking efforts after reading the report. At the UN world conference on human trafficking in Vienna in February 2008, I heard dozens consider it rightly the state-of-the-art global report, like no other. [Read more →]

In a few days, a group of non-government organizations will be meeting with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about a serious human trafficking matter: the veritable enslavement of some domestic servants by diplomats.  On our soil. [Read more →]

Political prisoner in North Korea

The world rightly is concerned about how the North Korean regime continues to threaten its neighbors with its nuclear capability and, more recently, missiles to deliver them.  However, it is no less urgent to consider how that same regime threatens the security of its own people.  It is all a piece of a North Korean government threatening people’s welfare. [Read more →]

At the Karma Nightclub in Minneapolis a few days ago, April 5, there was a Players Ball.

Let’s stop for a minute.  That’s a publicly-advertised wild bash at a nightclub, celebrating pimps’ business… What’s wrong with this picture? [Read more →]