One hundred and fifty years after Wilberforce. every government in the world sets its public face against slavery. The last to outlaw the chains was the tiny African state of Mauritania ... but that was only three years ago. Today, human rights campaigners are no less anxious about the millions of victims of forced labour than were their 19th-century predecessors concerned about legal slaves, because as the Secretary General of the Commonwealth says. there is still ' an unbroken line of servitude '.
Adam Raphael investigates examples of debt-bondage, child labour, serfdom, women sold into prostitution and men press-ganged into sweated-labour camps.
Producer JOCK GALLAGHER
BBC Birmingham