Thomson Reuters World-Check and Liberty Asia exceed 5,000 names in anti-human trafficking initiative

HONG KONG & NEW YORK – Thomson Reuters and Liberty Asia, a leading anti-slavery organization worldwide, have cleared a major milestone in their anti-human trafficking initiative, surpassing 5,000 names of suspects loaded to the World-Check database since announcing their partnership in mid-October 2015.

The partnership between Thomson Reuters and Liberty Asia has developed an effective and scalable way to collect and monitor data on the identities of arrested traffickers to provide business decision makers with actionable information.

Under the initiative, which abides by the same strict inclusion policy criteria defined by World-Check for all database listings, Liberty Asia has worked with partner NGOs across the Asia-Pacific region to collate names of alleged and arrested human and wildlife trafficking suspects, as reported in the public domain, submitting them as leads to the World-Check research team for further review and verification before they are considered for inclusion.

The partnership between Thomson Reuters and Liberty Asia’s Media Monitoring Programme works to address the information needs of the international business community, focusing particularly on anti-money laundering (AML), and screening third-parties’ uses of data in corporate supply chains to reveal forced labor outsourcing practices associated with modern slavery and human trafficking.

“Our partnership with Liberty Asia, which complements existing human trafficking content on the World-Check database, has allowed us to successfully add 5,000 new profiles and reflects our ongoing commitment to reducing the scourge of human slavery,” said BC Tan, head of Client and Third Party Risk, Asia Pacific at Thomson Reuters. “Through this initiative we are accessing sources via a larger network. Intelligence is all about putting pieces together to get the whole picture. Through relationships with highly regarded anti-human trafficking organizations like Liberty Asia and its partners, Thomson Reuters World-Check is able to obtain quality information that allows our business clients to make informed decisions for their most pressing problems.”

Thomson Reuters World-Check is a highly structured database of intelligence on heightened risk individuals and organizations. Widely adopted by the world’s largest financial institutions and corporations, World-Check intelligence supports the Know Your Customer and Third Party Risk due diligence process. World-Check can help uncover risk associated with sanctions, organized crime, fraud, money laundering, bribery and corruption, as well as modern day slavery and country risk. For example, a recent project run by Thomson Reuters Labs in collaboration with World-Check provides an intelligent geographical slavery risk ranking, per the ensuing infographic: https://risk.thomsonreuters.com/en/resources/infographic/modern-slavery-a-case-study-of-one-global-organisations-risk-exposure-to-slavery.html, illustrating a global organization’s risk exposure to modern slavery via its subsidiaries and other third party supply chains.  

“A good person wants to know who their clients are. The truth of it is that a transaction becomes less attractive because there is a risk of some sort of criminal activity occurring in that area,” said Duncan Jepson, Founder and Director of Liberty Asia. “This initiative, with the support of Thomson Reuters World-Check, and crucially our NGO partners, is vital in bringing information on the criminal activity that is human and wildlife trafficking, through a highly respected and trusted platform to business professionals.”

Find complete information on World-Check.

Thomson Reuters

Thomson Reuters is the world’s leading source of news and information for professional markets. Our customers rely on us to deliver the intelligence, technology and expertise they need to find trusted answers. The business has operated in more than 100 countries for more than 100 years. Thomson Reuters shares are listed on the Toronto and New York Stock Exchanges. For more information, visit www.thomsonreuters.com.

Liberty Asia

Liberty Asia was established in 2012, as a HK-registered Non-Governmental Organisation (“NGO"), comprised of a group of former corporate professionals from banking, legal and technology sectors, as well as specialists from other NGOs, who feel strongly that a more effective, coordinated response to slavery is essential and that leveraging corporate sector technology & techniques and providing it to the NGO sector will facilitate this response.

Liberty Asia has become a conduit for information flows between civil society and the corporate sector (financial institutions, consulting and advisory firms, due diligence providers, and 3rd party database providers), as well as regulators (i.e. banking regulators & FIUs), for information on those individuals and entities that are facilitating and / or profiting from the business of slavery. For more information, go to https://www.libertyasia.org/.

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