Local Lib Dem Euro MP Wallis says anti-slavery movement has unfinished business

3.00.02pm GMT Fri 9th Feb 2007

On the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery local Hull Euro MP, Diana Wallis, a long time campaigner against human trafficking, will say, in a visit to the University of Hull's Wilberforce Institute for Slavery and Emancipation (WISE), that for the anti-slavery movement there is still unfinished business.

Diana Wallis, MEP for Yorkshire and the Humber and a Vice President of the European Parliament, took up an invitation to visit WISE on Friday 9 February.

In advance of the visit Diana Wallis MEP said:

"Here in Hull this year we are rightly commemorating the work of William Wilberforce and his colleagues who led the campaign that succeeded in convincing Parliament to abolish the British slave trade. But two hundred years on, slavery and other forms of coerced labour continue to blight millions of lives.

"Slave trafficking, child labour, forced prostitution and other abuses of human rights, according to some authorities, have increased in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in the context of globalisation and widening differentials in wealth.

"Let's be clear, trafficking in people is a vicious and well organised crime which is causing untold human misery. It is in effect a modern form of slavery.

"We have seen over the past months a number of well-publicised cases of young women brought into Britain to be tricked and coerced into working as prostitutes.

"I am pleased to see that the UK will, finally, sign up to the European Convention against Trafficking will help ensure that victims of this evil trade in people will receive some protection when they escape or are rescued here in the UK.

"However, it goes to show that the anti-slavery movement still has unfinished business and I am pleased to see that Hull, through the city's Wilberforce Institute for Slavery and Emancipation, is playing a key role both in remembering the work of Wilberforce and in highlighting this modern misery."

Photo shows Diana Wallis MEP with (right) Professor David Richardson, Director of WISE and Dr. Nicholas Evans, Lecturer in Slavery Studies, in front of the 'WISE Wall'