This paper analyzes contemporary slavery and its progressive definition in International Law, highlighting the progress of this reality in the European continent, as well as the existence of a more political than legal refusal to recognize its existence. For the time being, the highest European court in the field of human rights, the ECHR, has not had many occasions to comment on this. The decision of the ECHR of March 30, 2017, has been the last and most important one dictated on the subject and through it, comparing it with the norms of the UN and the ILO, its defining elements are analyzed here, differentiating the historical slavery of the new forms of slavery, in which the difficulty of defining when a working relationship under conditions of extreme exploitation and submission exceeds the scope of the employment contract and constitute criminal offenses —trata for the purpose of labor exploitation, submission to slavery— is observed and forced labor. The factual assumption of this judgment refers to a group of agrarian workers, seasonal (harvesting of strawberries) foreigners — nationals of Bangladesh—, in irregular situation, without work permit, in Greece. Given the conditions of life and work (since both areas are developed in the same time and space), but especially in the event of non-payment of six months of agreed salary, they start a strike to demand the payment of said salaries, being killed shots by armed guards of the company. Greece issued for violation of art. 4 of the European Convention on the Rights of Man and Fundamental Freedoms on trafficking in human beings, forced labor and slavery or similar practices. The ECHR condemns Greece for breach of active obligations-prevention of trafficking, and protection of victims. However, the ECHR does not consider that slavery or servitude existed, which can provide us with relevant elements in order to demarcate all these phenomena of extreme labor exploitation linked to situations of vulnerability and great vulnerability; or going beyond, critically, to detect a certain reluctance in this judicial body to admit the existence of contemporary forms of slavery in Europe. Apart from the specific sentence, this is compared with other international jurisdictional instances and warns of the risks that precarious work can lead to practices in fraud of law in which the apparent employment contract conceals authentic relations of slavery.

Slavery Forced labor Freedom Vulnerability Servitude dignity Trafficking for labor exploitation Neo-slavery Strike

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