18th Annual Prague Pre-Moot (Vis Moot Preliminary Round)

Forced labour in South-East Asia is a long-standing structural problem rooted in poverty, irregular migration, and the region's deep integration into global supply chains for garments, seafood, electronics, palm oil, and rubber. The ILO estimates that the Asia-Pacific accounts for the largest absolute number of people in forced labour worldwide, with Thailand's fishing industry, Malaysia's electronics and glove manufacturing, and Myanmar's post-coup garment sector among the most heavily documented cases. Recruitment debt, passport confiscation, and abusive subcontracting through layers of brokers have been repeatedly identified by the ILO, US Department of Labor, and civil society as systemic drivers. Since the mid-2010s, exposés on Thai fishing fleets and Rohingya trafficking prompted reforms such as Thailand's ratification of ILO Protocol 29 and the EU's 'yellow card' on Thai seafood. Buyer-state regulation has accelerated: the US Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act and Tariff Act Section 307, Germany's Supply Chain Due Diligence Act, and the EU's Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive and Forced Labour Regulation now create extraterritorial pressure on ASEAN exporters. Withhold Release Orders against Malaysian glove and palm oil firms have shown both the leverage and the limits of import bans. Today the debate centres on how to align ASEAN's traditionally consensus-based, non-interference approach with binding due diligence regimes imposed by importing markets, how to protect migrant workers from Cambodia, Myanmar, Indonesia, and the Philippines who move across the region, and how to address the explosion of forced labour inside online scam compounds in Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos. Remediation, victim identification, and access to remedy for workers — not merely import bans that can leave them stranded — remain the central unresolved questions.

Since 9/11, states have expanded surveillance powers to detect terrorism and serious crime, often in tension with privacy rights protected under the ICCPR and regional instruments such as the European Convention on Human Rights. The Snowden disclosures in 2013, the EU Court of Justice's Schrems and Digital Rights Ireland judgments, and the steady rollout of end-to-end encryption in services like WhatsApp, Signal, and iMessage have made the encryption question a defining civil-liberties battleground. Governments argue that ubiquitous encryption creates investigative blind spots; privacy advocates and technologists counter that any mandated access undermines security for all users. The so-called 'chat control' debate refers principally to the European Commission's 2022 proposed Regulation on preventing and combating child sexual abuse (CSAR), which would empower authorities to issue detection orders compelling providers — potentially including end-to-end encrypted services — to scan private communications for illicit content. Successive Council presidencies have struggled to find a qualified majority, with Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Poland and others raising fundamental rights concerns, while France, Spain, Ireland and the Commission have pushed variants of mandatory client-side scanning. Parallel debates are unfolding in the UK (Online Safety Act), the US (EARN IT Act proposals), and Australia (TOLA Act), and the UN Cybercrime Convention adopted in 2024 has raised concerns about exported surveillance norms. The core dispute is whether scanning private messages — even for grave crimes such as child sexual abuse material or terrorism — is compatible with the essence of the rights to privacy and confidential communication, the principle of proportionality, and the technical integrity of encryption. The European Data Protection Board, EDPS, UN Special Rapporteurs on privacy and freedom of expression, and leading cryptographers have warned that client-side scanning amounts to general monitoring. The question facing legislators is whether targeted, judicially supervised measures can replace bulk detection, and how to reconcile child protection and counter-terrorism objectives with the non-derogable core of digital rights.