Bonavero Discussion Group: Re-Covering Forced Labour: Colonial Foreclosures and Forgotten Potentials

We are delighted to welcome Professor Christopher Roberts to lead our Bonavero Discussion Group session on 17th June 2025.

In his talk, Professor Roberts will share the findings of his recent research on the history of the history of the 1930 Convention concerning Forced or Compulsory Labour, discussed in his article  'Re-covering Forced Labour: Colonial Foreclosures and Forgotten Potentials'. A careful study of the archival record leading to agreement on the convention, like that leading to its closely linked predecessor, the 1926 Convention to Suppress the Slave Trade and Slavery, reveals that while the processes leading to both were initially open-ended, colonial interests ultimately produced sharp limitations in both texts. Recognising the colonial foundations of contemporary international law in this area should enhance our openness to reconsidering how we think about coercive labour today. The development of the Forced Labour Convention did not only consist in limiting dynamics, however. While they were pushed to the margins, this article also highlights three areas — conditions of work, conditions of life and worker freedoms — in which the historical record helps to suggest a more expansive, progressive understanding of forced labour than that which has become commonplace. Reconstructing our approach to forced labour, with attention to these potentials, can revitalise the concept in the contemporary world, overcoming close to a century of foreclosure.

Professor Robert's article is forthcoming in the Melbourne Journal of International Law. You can access an advance copy of the article by clicking on the link above. 

Christopher Roberts is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Professor Roberts’ research focuses on the evolution of public order legality, human and workers’ rights and the idea of development in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century British Empire and at the international level. Professor Roberts is the Chair of the Transnational Legal History Group within the Law Faculty’s Centre for Comparative and Transnational Law. He is the former Assistant Dean for Undergraduate Studies and current Deputy Director of the LLM Programme in charge of the LLM in Legal History. He is also an Associate Research Fellow with the Institute for Commonwealth Studies, part of the University of London’s School of Advanced Study.

In addition to his academic work, Professor Roberts has worked as an expert legal consultant addressing issues such as constitutional and legal reform, the rule of law and human rights with intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations and mandate holders such as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the United Nations Children’s Fund, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, the Fédération International pour les Droits Humains, Avocats Sans Frontières, the International Refugee Assistance Project, the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, Transparency Maldives and others.

Roxana Banu is a fellow and associate professor in law at Lady Margaret Hall and the Faculty of Law. Prior to joining Oxford University, she was a lecturer in private international law at Queen Mary University Faculty of Law and an Assistant Professor of Law at Western Law School in Canada.  After undertaking studies in Berlin and New York, she completed her PhD at the University of Toronto, where she was awarded the Alan Marks Medal for the best graduate thesis and the Strauss Fellowship in International Law.  Roxana’s interests lie in private and public international law, legal history, and feminist theory. She is the co-editor of the first volume on Philosophical Foundations of Private International Law, forthcoming with OUP in the series “Philosophical Foundations of Law.” 

Ryan Hanley is Senior Lecturer in Modern British History at the University of Exeter and a 2024/5 Visiting Fellow in History at Mansfield College, Oxford. His research explores the long history of British slavery and anti-slavery. He is currently working on a new global history of the half-measures, perverse compromises and abject failures of British abolitionism from 1787-2030, tentatively titled ‘Unfinished Business: An Incomplete History of British Anti-Slavery’, due to be published by Oxford University Press in 2032.

Marija Jovanovic is a human rights lawyer with a research interest in modern slavery and human trafficking, business and human rights, labour rights, migration and refugee law, and regional human rights regimes. She holds DPhil, MPhil, and Magister Juris degrees from the University of Oxford, and a law degree from Serbia. Marija is currently a Research Fellow in Business and Human Rights at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights, and a co-Investigator to the AHRC-funded Modern Slavery and Human Rights Policy and Evidence Centre. She also holds a Senior Lectureship at the Essex Law School. She previously held a Research Fellowship at the Centre for International Law, the National University of Singapore, and a Lectureship in Law in Serbia. She is the author of State Responsibility for ‘Modern Slavery’ in Human Rights Law (OUP 2023) and her recent work includes a research project on the experiences of modern slavery survivors in the UK prisons and a legal analysis of compatibility of UK’s immigration law with its international obligations towards victims of modern slavery.