The Protocol’s Compromises
-
Published:September 2024
Chapter 2 examines the politics of compromise underpinning the adoption of the UN Trafficking Protocol. It first explores why UN member states moved to adopt a protocol on human trafficking after years of overlooking the issue, considering how legal and political compromises shaped their participation. The chapter then considers how differently situated feminist activists who were unequally involved, and variously invested, in the protocol’s drafting understood the compromises lacing their participation. It argues that as a legal instrument authored by powerful national governments, the protocol was an accomplishment not only of institutional coordination and consensus but also of dismissal and silencing. Whereas compromise was celebrated by UN member-state governments as a strategy for successful consensus and heralded by feminists in the Global North as a measure of success, for grassroots feminists in the Philippines, it marked a lack of political pull and the deferral of necessary political-economic change.