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(Vatican Radio) The Permanent Observer of the Holy See to the United Nations, Archbishop Bernardito Auza, is participating in the United Nations Security Council Open Debate on Trafficking in persons in conflict situations: forced labour, slavery and other similar practices, which is taking place this week at UN Headquarters in New York.

In remarks prepared for the occasion and dated March 15, Archbishop Auza calls on the Security Council to take a leading role in trafficking prevention, especially by recognizing the close connection between trafficking and the persistence of armed conflicts.

“[T]he Holy See urges the Security Council to take a greater role in the fight against the scourge of trafficking in persons,” Archbishop Auza says, “primarily through its responsibility to prevent and end armed conflicts and to help in the consolidation of peace and development.”

Below, please find the full text of Archbishop Auza’s prepared remarks

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Intervention of H.E. Archbishop Bernardito Auza
Apostolic Nuncio and Permanent Observer of the Holy See to the United Nations
United Nations Security Council Open Debate on
Trafficking in persons in conflict situations:
forced labour, slavery and other similar practices
New York, 15 March 2017

Mr. President,

The Holy See thanks the Presidency of the United Kingdom for raising this topic to the level of Open Debate in this Chamber.

By words and actions, Pope Francis has made it very clear from his very first days as Pope that the fight against trafficking in persons would be one of the defining priorities of his papacy.  He has not hesitated in defining it as a form of slavery, a crime against humanity, a shameful and grave violation of human rights, an atrocious scourge that is present throughout the world on a broad scale, even as tourism.

The flood of trafficking victims has many tributaries. Among these are extreme poverty, underdevelopment and exclusion, especially when combined with a lack of access to education or scarce, even non-existent, employment opportunities. Human traffickers have no qualms about exploiting very vulnerable people escaping economic privation and natural disasters.

In our day, however, wars and conflicts have become the prime driver of trafficking in persons. They provide an enabling environment for traffickers to operate, as persons fleeing persecutions and conflicts are particularly vulnerable to being trafficked. Conflicts have created conditions for terrorists, armed groups and transnational organized crime networks to thrive in exploiting individuals and populations reduced to extreme vulnerability by persecution and multiple forms of violence.

In this context, my delegation expresses once again profound concern for the ancient Christian communities, Yezidis and other religious and ethnic minority groups in the Mesopotamia, who have been enslaved, sold, killed and subjected to extreme forms of humiliation. The apparent lack of serious efforts to bring to justice the perpetrators of such acts of genocide and massive violations of human rights and international humanitarian law leaves so many perplexed and wondering how many more atrocities can be tolerated before the victims obtain rescue, protection and justice.

Mr. President,

The Holy See once more would like to underline its constant and firm condemnation of the relative ease with which arms, even weapons of mass destruction, get into the hands of terrorists and armed groups, giving them the means to continue with equally relative ease to traffic and enslave individuals and even entire communities.  The proliferation of arms, whether they are weapons of mass destruction or “merely conventional,” facilitates and prolongs violent conflicts that make people extremely vulnerable to traffickers and smugglers. As long as wars and conflicts rage, trafficking in persons for sexual exploitation, forced labour and similar crimes will continue to flourish. The Holy See therefore strongly appeals to States not to supply arms to groups or to regimes that would most likely use them against their very own people, to implement strictly arms-related treaties, and to use the full force of the law in the fight against arms trafficking.

Moreover, the criminalization of undocumented and irregular migrants exacerbates their vulnerabilities, drives them closer to the embrace of traffickers and to more extreme forms of exploitation, and renders them less likely to collaborate with the law enforcement authorities to catch and punish the traffickers.

Mr. President,

The challenge that trafficking in persons poses is immense and requires a commensurate response. Today, that response is still far from being equal to the challenge. As Pope Francis has noted several times, even though the international community has adopted numerous agreements and individual countries have adopted laws aimed at ending slavery in all its forms, even though various strategies to combat this phenomenon have been launched at both national and international levels, much more still needs to be done on the level of raising public awareness and effecting a better coordination of efforts by governments, the judiciary, law enforcement officials and social workers to save the millions of children, women and men who are still deprived of freedom and are forced to live in slave-like conditions.

In a special way, the Holy See urges the Security Council to take a greater role in the fight against the scourge of trafficking in persons, primarily through its responsibility to prevent and end armed conflicts and to help in the consolidation of peace and development.

Thank you, Mr. President.

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(Vatican Radio) “[T]he Holy See urges the Security Council to take a greater role in the fight against the scourge of trafficking in persons.” That is the message of the Permanent Observer of the Holy See to the United Nations, Archbishop Bernardito Auza, who was invited this week to address the United Nations Security Council Open Debate on Trafficking in persons in conflict situations: forced labour, slavery and other similar practices, at UN Headquarters in New York.

The Secretary General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, personally opened the debate, describing the issue as one of global scope and massive proportions.

“Trafficking networks have gone global,” he said, citing statistics from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, to say that victims can be found in 106 countries.

The International Labour Organization, meanwhile, reports that 21 million people around the world are victims of forced labour and extreme exploitation, and that the total annual profits are estimated to be $150 billion.

“Beyond these numbers is the human toll,” Guterres said, “the lives cut short, the families and societies torn apart, the gross violations of human rights and international humanitarian law.”

Guttieres said, “Women and girls in particular are targeted again and again and again. We see brutal sexual exploitation, including forced prostitution, forced marriage and sexual slavery,” though, “human trafficking takes many forms.”

In remarks prepared for the occasion and dated March 15, Archbishop Auza calls on the Security Council to take a leading role in trafficking prevention, especially by recognizing the close connection between trafficking and the persistence of armed conflicts.

Click below to hear our report

Archbishop Auza says, “The challenge that trafficking in persons poses is immense and requires a commensurate response. Today, that response is still far from being equal to the challenge.”

Archbishop Auza goes on to say, “[M]uch more still needs to be done on the level of raising public awareness and effecting a better coordination of efforts by governments, the judiciary, law enforcement officials and social workers to save the millions of children, women and men who are still deprived of freedom and are forced to live in slave-like conditions.”

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(Vatican Radio) It is now been six years since the start of a brutal civil war that has engulfed Syria. The ongoing conflict has forced  thousands of people to flee and has left countless others who have remained trapped in besieged areas throughout the country.

Within Syria the charity Christian Aid is supporting partners provide hot meals to people recently displaced by the bombing of towns north east of the capital Damascus.

Máiréad Collins, Advocacy Officer for Syria with the organisation told Lydia O’Kane they are calling on world leaders to act now and bring to an end the suffering of the people there.

Listen: 

“What are partners said to us the other day was that these people are no longer thinking in terms of politics and the outcome, all they want at this stage is the opportunity to live and not to die”, she said.

Ms Collins added, “there is a constant humanitarian crisis ongoing and it is not being recognised for what it is and rather than people thinking about the various military and militants and armed factions fighting that this is the real impact on the ground.”

For next month’s conference in Brussels, Supporting The Future Of Syria And The Region, Christian Aid hopes that this will bring solid action to guarantee an end to sieges, an end to attacks on civilians, unhindered humanitarian access and keeps humanitarian protection at the heart of decision making about the future of Syria.

The Advocacy Officer notes that there are so many parties to this conflict and it is a war that has been fought out with so many international actors having an interest in it. But she stresses that there is still time for people to act and the upcoming Brussels conference allows that possibility.

According to the United Nations 13.5 million people in Syria require humanitarian assistance, including 4.6 million people in need trapped in besieged and hard-to-reach areas.

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Rome, Italy, Mar 16, 2017 / 02:50 am (CNA/EWTN News).- This week Cardinal George Pell sat down with some 20 students from Harvard visiting Rome, with the goal of challenging them to both set firm ideals and to work hard to achieve them – something the Church can help with by providing a basic framework for moral leadership.

In a March 14 interview with CNA ahead of his speech, Cardinal Pell said the main point he would make to the students is “that they need a cause. They need a set of principles that they accept and follow and that they will be prepared to make sacrifices for.”

He stressed the importance of conveying the message that as future leaders “they need to be courageous and they need to be persevering. And if they can be strategists, take a long-term view, so much the better.”

Cardinal Pell, prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy, spoke just before giving his speech on Principled Leadership to a group of 20 people who are among Harvard University’s graduating class of 2017 and who traveled to Rome for a four-day “Harvard Vatican Leadership Summit.”

A student-led initiative, the event was held at the Pontifical Lateran University and hosted students from various backgrounds at Harvard, including the business, law, divinity, medical, and dental schools.

In addition to Cardinal Pell, other key figures participants have met with during the summit include Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin; Vatican Secretary for Relations with the States, Archbishop Paul Gallagher; Cardinal Peter Turkson, president of the Pontifical Council for Integral Human Development; and Cardinal Giuseppe Versaldi, prefect of the Congregation for Catholic Education.

In his comments to CNA, Cardinal Pell outlined the key principles that ought to guide business and economic decisions, saying that no matter what, “you must be aware of the common good.”

“Think of the whole of society, not just the shareholders, not just the workers in the small group,” he said. “Have some real understanding of what justice is. Have a special sensitivity for those who are less fortunate, those who are poor.”

One of the most important things to have a constant awareness of is our responsibility toward future generations, he said, cautioning that one modern danger is that “people know more and more about less and less.”

An advantage of the Catholic Church in this regard, he said, is that it can help provide “a general scheme” into which specific principles, causes, and points of view can fit.

However, he stressed that despite the Church’s role in providing this scheme for various fields, particularly economics and business, it is above all a religious institution, and as such doesn’t embrace any one system in particular.

Reflecting on criticisms Pope Francis has at times voiced in reference to the current global market system, the cardinal stressed that the Pope “is a religious leader, he is not an economist.”

The Church, he said, “does not espouse socialism, much less communism or Nazism or the free market. It announces general principles and says this fits or that doesn't fit.”

“We should listen very seriously to everything the Pope says on economics,” he said, but emphasized that as Christians, we listen to him because “he is the successor of Peter, he teaches us things religious.”

In this sense the Pope is applying Gospel standards to the economic situation, Cardinal Pell said, adding that if he himself were to speak out on the topic, people wouldn’t necessarily need to take notes on the economic aspect, “but if I preach the Gospel, I hope people listen.”

Since not all of the students participating in the summit are Catholic, the cardinal voiced his hope that they would walk away with at least a better idea of the Church’s social doctrine.

He brought a compendium of the social doctrine of the Church for each of the participants, because it is “a coherent exposition on many, many important topics,” including “right and wrong, natural law, subsidiarity, the common good and different types of justice.”

The Catholic Church is “one of the few organizations that has an over-arching system of thought to make people think,” he said, explaining that “it is logical and coherent, it's an impressive piece of work.”

Cardinal Pell praised the idea of summit as unique, and “exactly what a Catholic university needs to be doing.”

“I think the Christian perspective brings flourishing, brings life, makes good societies, brings happiness, development,” he said. So to have a group of students from a university such as Harvard is “a wonderful thing. I think it'll be good for them and it'll be good for us.”

Okendo Lewis, a student at the John F. Kennedy School of Government who spent part of his childhood in Milan, was the one who initially thought of the summit and made it happen with the help of Mary Ann Glendon, who was a US Ambassador to the Holy See during the George W. Bush administration and who now teaches at Harvard Law School.

In comments to CNA, Lewis said part of why he wanted to offer students a Vatican perspective on leadership is because “there seems to be a crisis in leadership” throughout the world, “and Pope Francis very much speaks to many who are trying to figure out how to lead in these difficult times.”

“I definitely wanted this next generation of leaders, whether they’re in business or in medicine or in law, to learn from the wisdom of the Pope, but also the city and the Church, which has had two thousand years of experience,” he said.

Lewis said he initially had doubts about whether or not people would come, since it was already late when they started to advertise the trip. However, they received over 180 applications, and had to narrow it down to 20 spots.

“I think that speaks to the power of the Catholic Church and the interest there is in Pope Francis. So people were actually very enthusiastic to be here,” he said.

Lewis voiced his hope that the summit would become an annual event. This year’s theme of “How to Answer the Call to Serve” fits into what most of the university’s students hope to accomplish, he said, explaining that “they’re trying to figure out how to leverage their education and their studies to help meet the needs of society, how can they be student leaders.”

“So my hope is that this will become an annual tradition so that students across Harvard and hopefully across the United States, can come to Rome and learn from so many of the institutions here where there’s the pontifical universities, there are dicasteries, and certainly the Pope himself.”

Kiernan Schmidt, a student at Harvard Business School, told CNA he wanted to participate not only because of his Irish and Catholic background, but also because the idea of “how morality plays into the decisions we make” as leaders in various fields.

“The idea of examining how morality guides our leadership styles was really the main impetus,” he said, adding that Pope Francis’ challenge for global leaders “to reexamine what we’re doing for each other and how we think of ourselves as leaders” was also a key factor.

What had impacted Schmidt so far in the meetings they had with Vatican officials was “hearing humility from almost every level of leadership that we've met with.”

Another point of particular interest was gaining “a profound understanding that traditions and conditions in local Churches can be very different from what you hear in Rome.”

“I think that that adjusting of leadership and tactics in how we approach problems can be very different in the cultural context,” he said, noting that in their meeting with Archbishop Gallagher, the prelate told them that he not only explains Rome to the local Churches of where he goes, but he also “explains the local Churches to Rome.”

This “two-way dialogue” in the Church, Schmidt said, “was something that felt very new, very refreshing and very modern and also very true to the words we hear from Pope Francis, you know, approaching problems with humility and seeking to talk one to one.”

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