Debt bondage

Debt bondage, also known as debt slavery, bonded labour, or peonage, is the pledge of a person's services as security for the repayment for a debt or other obligation. Where the terms of the repayment are not clearly or reasonably stated, or where the debt is excessively large, the person who holds the debt has thus some control over the laborer, whose freedom depends on the undefined or excessive debt repayment. The services required to repay the debt may be undefined, and the services' duration may be undefined, thus allowing the person supposedly owed the debt to demand services indefinitely. Debt bondage can be passed on from generation to generation.

In 2021, the International Labour Organization estimated that, of the 27.6 million people currently participating in forced labour, 20.9%, or about 5.8 million, were in debt bondage. Debt bondage has been described by the United Nations as a form of "modern day slavery", and the Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery seeks to abolish the practice.

The practice is still prevalent primarily in South Asia and parts of Western and Southern Africa, although most countries in these regions are parties to the Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery. Lack of prosecution or insufficient punishment of this crime are the leading causes of the practice as it exists at this scale today.

Though the Forced Labour Convention of 1930 by the International Labour Organization, which included 187 parties, sought to bring organised attention to eradicating slavery through forms of forced labor, formal opposition to debt bondage in particular came at the Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery in 1956. The convention in 1956 defined debt bondage under Article 1, section (a):

Debt bondage, that is to say, the status or condition arising from a pledge by a debtor of his personal services or of those of a person under his control as security for a debt if the value of those services as reasonably assessed is not applied towards the liquidation of the debt or the length and nature of those services are not respectively limited and defined;

When a pledge to provide services to pay off debt is made by an individual, the employer often illegally inflates interest rates at an unreasonable amount, making it impossible for the individual to leave bonded labour. When the bonded labourer dies, debts are often passed on to children.

Although debt bondage, forced labour, and human trafficking are all defined as forms or variations of slavery, each term is distinct. Debt bondage differs from forced labour and human trafficking in that a person consciously pledges to work as a means of repayment of debt without being placed into labor against will.

Debt bondage only applies to individuals who have no hopes of leaving the labor due to inability to ever pay debt back. Those who offer their services to repay a debt and the employer reduces the debt accordingly at a rate commensurate with the value of labor performed are not in debt bondage.