4    No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.

America likes to tell its own story as if slavery were an incidental mistake. Most in the US do not make the link between emancipation and increased prison populations, and in people moving from direct slavery to a kind of wage slavery where the person works all week long and still remains poor. We also do not count sweatshop laborers as our slaves, although they most certainly are.

The fourth paragraph of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, if taken seriously, would lead to the end not only of human trafficking, but of all disguised forms of slavery such as prison labor, sweatshops and exploitative business practices that amount to slavery with nominal compensation.