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Summary: Cecilia Flores-Oebabda the leader of the Philippine delegation campaigning to bring about a better world for millions of children enslaved as workers marched down the streets of Geneva together with thousands of people. It was the culmination of the Great Global March against child labour that had begun in the Philippines and continued through dozens of nations around the globe led by Kailash Satyarthi, the world famous campaigner for the abolition of child labour.In the Philippines, the movement was led by Cecilia Flores-Oebabda, the founder and leader of Visayan Forum, a charity that is famous for rescuing children from slave like conditions in all sectors of Philippine society and winner of the 2005 antislavery award.
We came together in Geneva to focus the glare of world media and public opinion on the delegates gathered at the international Labour organisation (ILO) conference held in the majestic UN building above the shimmering lake Geneva with it's gigantic water spout dominating the view. That was in 1998 and the ILO did pass the most comprehensive legislation of the ILO Convention on the worst forms of child labour soon after.
The Philippines has ratified it but much need to be done to implement it and the work of Visayan Forum under the guidance of Cecilia has saved thousands of children from abusive working conditions and got them back to their families and to school. Domestic child labour, the main focus of Cecilia's work, is for thousands of children the hardest and most damaging life imaginable.
But all that is well understood by Cecilia, herself, having to work hard as an impoverished child. At 14, she was an active church organiser helping exploited workers. When she was 17, she joined the freedom fighters resisting the oppressive and cruel regime of the tyrant president Ferdinand Marcos. There she learned how to organise and mobilise people to work together and help each other survive extreme poverty and military oppression.
She was captured and imprisoned for four years. There in captivity she married and gave birth to her children. After the overthrown of Marcos by a people's Power movement in 1986 she was released. A few years later in 1991 Cecilia set up the Visayan Forum named after the region where she was born and worked and risked her life for social justice. Millions of people from the Visayan region migrate to Manila and many children are trafficked into domestic labour and sweat shops. Cecilia's mission is to uncover this sordid exploitation and free the trafficked children and give them a decent life. Her dedication to have the Domestic Workers Bill passed into law will one day succeed and curb the trafficking of children into hard dehumanising labour.
There are at lest 10 million children in domestic work around the world and an estimated 1.2 million in the Philippines. But there are many more than that in Pakistan, India and Bangladesh enslaved in bonded labour. That is a lifetime of work without pay. The parents receive a onetime payment to save them from starvation and must work for free with their children to pay it back. They never can and so are enslaved. I have seen with my own eyes, small children carrying baskets of bricks on their tiny heads on an Indian building site years ago and I never forgot it. The enslavement of children in dens of prostitution is perhaps the worst form of child labour that must be eliminated. The children rescued from brothels and in our Preda charity home suffer trauma and nightmares for years. That evil too has to be eliminated. This struggle for freedom form child labour has to continue and with people like Cecilia Flores-Oebabda winning the antislavery award one more round has been won for the children that she so courageously serves.