A single, superficial principle: oppose the powerful and back the weak, no matter what the powerful stand for or what the weak stand for

One of the main reasons our awareness of modern slavery remains so meager is that the flagship human rights organizations seem completely uninterested in the phenomenon

writes the University of Arizona's Uriah Kriegel (thanks to RV), echoing Ralph Peters and (more theoretically) Roger Scruton as he concludes that after "all, a right to one's own body is a condition of all other rights".

This is primarily because the perpetrators do not represent the kind of highly visible figures NGOs are eager to confront. Most human rights groups are driven today by a single, superficial principle: oppose the powerful and back the weak, no matter what the powerful stand for or what the weak stand for. …

Amnesty International is an unfortunate case, but many NGOs reveal similar propensities. Today's slave-owners and slave-capturers are usually Muslim fundamentalists who ride the African plains on horseback terrorizing local populations. But on the global stage, they wield virtually no power. As such, they do not excite the imagination of the majority human rights activists.

Instead of raising awareness and battling the existence of real-time slavery, the International Abolition of Slavery Day has become yet another occasion to rehash arguments for slave reparations in the US. Whatever your position on the issue of reparations, financial compensation to people whose current lives are comfortable (by comparison) should not take precedence over the liberation of actual slaves living in complete misery and utter destitution all over the African continent. Isn't there something rather perverse about the fact that concern for the treatment of terrorists agitates many of today's mainstream activists much more than concern for southern Sudanese people in the thralldom of Islamic fundamentalists?