Modern Forms of Slavery

Modern forms of slavery

As declared in the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, although the means and specificities of modern and traditional forms of slavery differ considerably, the violation of human rights and human dignity are central issues in both practices. According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), millions of people - primarily women and children - are subjected to modern forms of slavery and human trafficking. Human trafficking can be defined as "the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation." (UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children). UNESCO's "Project to Fight Human Trafficking in Africa" aims to promote effective and culturally appropriate policy-making to combat the trafficking of women and children in Western and Southern Africa. Through policy-oriented research on factors relating to trafficking, the project collects best practice models to fight trafficking at its roots. Various training workshops are organized to present these results to policymakers, NGOs, community leaders and the media. Furthermore, building on UNESCO's regional pillar of "extending international protection to endangered, vulnerable and minority cultures and cultural expressions", the "Trafficking and HIV/AIDS Project" based at the UNESCO Bangkok Office tackles the linked triad of problems-HIV/AIDS, trafficking, and non-traditional drug use-in the Greater Mekong Subregion. For this project, research is conducted and programs are developed to crosscut these issues and to address the needs of at-risk and vulnerable populations. For further information, see: Project to fight human trafficking in Africa UNESCO Bangkok Trafficking and HIV/AIDS Project Standards and Fundamental principles and rights at work (International Labour Organisation) Child Labour (United Nations Children's Fund) Human Rights Committee (United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights) Human Rights (UNESCO Sector for Social and Human Sciences)Today various international conventions define slavery and human trafficking as a "crime against humanity" punishable by international law. See legal instruments.

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Other narrative forms

Electronic literature is a literary genre consisting of works that originate in digital environments. Films, videos and broadcast soap operas have carved out a niche which often parallels the functionality of prose fiction. Graphic novels and comic books present stories told in a combination of sequential artwork, dialogue and text.

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Evolution and more refined forms

In modern times, several other instruments have been added to playing various parts in joropo performances, for instance, guitar, flute, clarinet, piano, and up to a complete symphony orchestra playing joropo arrangements

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Encoding forms

ISO/IEC 10646 defines several character encoding forms for the Universal Coded Character Set. The simplest, UCS-2,[Note uses a single code value (defined as a number, of which one or more represents a code point in general, but for UCS-2 it is strictly one code value that represents a code point) between 0 and 65,535 for each character, and allows exactly two bytes (one 16-bit word) to represent that value. UCS-2 thereby permits a binary representation of every code point in the BMP that represents a character. UCS-2 cannot represent code points outside the BMP. The first amendment to the original edition of the UCS defined UTF-16, an extension of UCS-2, to represent code points outside the BMP. A range of code points in the S (Special) Zone of the BMP remains unassigned to characters. UCS-2 disallows use of code values for these code points, but UTF-16 allows their use in pairs. Unicode also adopted UTF-16, but in Unicode terminology, the high-half zone elements become "high surrogates" and the low-half zone elements become "low surrogates".[clarification needed] Another encoding, UCS-4, uses four bytes (total 32 bits) to encode a single character of the codespace. Even though the Unicode restrict codespace to an upper limit of 10FFFF. The ISO/IEC 10646 standard has stated that all future assignments of characters will take place in the ranges up to 0x7FFFFFFFhex). UCS-4 allows representation of each value as exactly four bytes (one 32-bit word). UCS-4 thereby permits a binary representation of every code point in the UCS, including those outside the BMP. As in UCS-2, every encoded character has a fixed length in bytes, which makes it simple to manipulate, but of course it requires twice as much storage as UCS-2. Currently, the dominant UCS encoding is UTF-8, which is a variable-width encoding designed for backward compatibility with ASCII, and for avoiding the complications of endianness and byte-order marks in UTF-16 and UTF-32. More than 93% of all Web pages are encoded in UTF-8. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) requires all Internet protocols to identify the encoding used for character data, and the supported character encodings must include UTF-8. The Internet Mail Consortium (IMC) recommends that all e-mail programs be able to display and create mail using UTF-8. It is also increasingly being used as the default character encoding in operating systems, programming languages, APIs, and software applications. See also Comparison of Unicode encodings.