Exploitation, Unfree Labor, and Border Control Regime

Principle Investigator：Ya-Wen Yang

Exploitation generally refers to taking advantage of someone's vulnerability to gain unjust benefits. Philosophically, theories of exploitation discuss the conditions under which 'A exploits B' is satisfied, explaining why exploitation is morally wrong and articulating approaches to stop it. However, rich theoretical discussions seem irrelevant to exploitation in international human rights instruments or domestic law.
International laws that address various forms of unfree labour, such as forced labour and human trafficking, consider exploitation to be a central concept. For instance, labour or sexual exploitation is embedded in the legal definition of human trafficking, and forced labour is one of the most permanent forms of exploitative purposes. Despite its pivotal role, the legal definition of exploitation is purposefully unspecified in international law documents. Furthermore, different contexts, such as labour and sexual exploitation, may necessitate a different legal understanding of exploitation. This ambiguity highlights the need to assess whether the legal definition is adequate and to find anti-exploitation solutions.
This research project aims to bridge political and moral philosophy theories of exploitation with legal instruments of anti-exploitation in human rights law. It seeks to analyze the philosophical disputes underlying legal documents, clarify legal criteria of exploitation in domestic and international laws, and establish their conceptual connections with various forms of unfree labour, ranging from traditional slavery to modern slavery. Additionally, this project will examine how sovereign states' border regimes that control human mobility legitimize labour exploitation. Focusing on the operation of national border systems is essential, mainly because institutional factors that lead to exploitation must be addressed. Exploitation usually has systematic causes, among which the national border regime is one of the most salient. Without changing the institution leading to exploitation, our effort to diminish exploitation will make limited progress.
The expected contribution of this project is to define the scope of the state's human rights obligations to eradicate exploitation and constrain the operation of the border regime, the legitimacy of which is often left challenged.