Children’s Rights and Modern Slavery: Bridging a Gap in Literature and Practice

Naomi Lott - Lecturer in Law, UCL; John Fell Research Fellow, University of Oxford; Rights Lab Visiting Fellow in Law, Survivor Support and Children’s Rights, University of Nottingham. Dr Naomi Lott’s primary research interests are in the field of children's rights, with a particular focus on children's economic, social and cultural rights, and particularly the right to play. Naomi completed a PhD at the University of Nottingham on the child's right to play, examining the right from conception through to implementation. Naomi has conducted research on modern slavery and children's rights in conjunction with the United Nations University, Delta 8.7, the ILO and IOM, and the Rights Lab at the University of Nottingham. Naomi has recently completed a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the University of Oxford, and has published her work on the right to play in The Right of the Child to Play: From Conception to Implementation (Routledge, 2023). Pamela Vargas-Gorena is a Research Fellow in Human Rights and Anti-slavery Law at the University of Nottingham. Her research focuses on mapping global anti-slavery legislation in order to understand trends, successes and failures. She is a former Chief Legal Adviser of the Cabinet Office in her home country, Bolivia.  As a former Director of a Non-Profit working with vulnerable children and head of various government departments, she has contributed and advised on the development of laws, policies and programmes at central and local levels. Her research background includes comparative law and jurisprudence as well as the assessment of government law, policies, and capacities. She holds an MSc in Public Policy from the University of Bristol, LLM in Constitutional Law and a LLM in Administrative Law from Latin American universities. Katarina Schwarz - Rights Lab Associate Director (Law and Policy Programme) and Associate Professor of Antislavery Law and Policy. Dr Katarina Schwarz leads the Rights Lab’s Law and Policy Programme. Her research interrogates the law and policy frameworks operating at the global, regional, and domestic level to determine the elements of effective anti-slavery governance and map trends, successes, and failures in this area. This includes work developing and analysing the Antislavery in Domestic Legislation Database—the world’s first comprehensive database of the domestic legislation and international obligations of all 193 UN Member States with regard to slavery and related forms of exploitation.