VATICAN CORNER
It began with a schoolgirl’s terrible discovery. The 17 year old daughter of Australian mining tycoon Andrew Forrest went back to Nepal to visit the orphanage where she had volunteered her help. She found that the girls were gone and had been trafficked into sex slavery by the people who were meant to take care of them. An-drew Forrest tried to follow the slavery trails which lead to India and then the Middle East. In Asia he found one terrorized nine-year-old Nepalese orphan who had been a victim of human traf-ficking and he was moved to act. His research made him look at his own companies and supply chains. He was horrified to find slavery there also. One company he found confiscated the work-er’s passports and the annual death rate among the workers was 20%, with half being suicides. Mr. Forrest, a billionaire, had previously invested millions of dollars in Aboriginal employment initiatives in Australia and so then in 2012 he decided to create Walk Free, a philanthropic charity focused on ending slavery world-wide. He began spending most of his time on philanthropic causes. He helped to launch the Global Slavery Index, alongside former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, which found that 29 million people were living in conditions of modern slavery around the world. The index identifies the countries where the problem is the most acute with 16 million enslaved in Pakistan and India alone. He began pushing chief executives of corporations to clean up their supply chains and to realise their culpability and the risk to their public image. But Mr. Forrest found that ”Wherever we’ve gone around the world we’ve found quite significant gaps: the holy texts, no matter which one you turn to, has ambiguity in it around slavery, that, we knew, was being used as justification by slavers all over the world.” So he began to contact the church on the subject. Pope Francis has identified slavery as one of the evils he is most keen to combat. Mr. Forrest proposed an alliance between the Catholic, Anglican and Sunni Muslim, Hindu and Bud-dhist faiths with his Walk Free Foundation. At the Vatican, after a year of negotiations, in December 2014, Mr. Forrest, Pope Francis, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Grand Imam of al-Azhar in Egypt launched the Global Freedom Network, and signed a declaration aimed at ending modern slavery by 2020. Specific ambitious targets were set to achieve this goal. To Be Continued…
Sources: Smh.com, ABCnet.au , theguardian.com ,cathnews.com