The network will call on the world’s 50 biggest corporations to root out exploitation of workers in their supply chains and ask the Group of 20 most advanced nations to set up a global fund to finance programmes tackling slavery.
“There are forms of slavery in all industrial sectors,” said Forrest, who has secured the support of fellow billionaires Bill Gates and Richard Branson.
Mahmoud Azab, on behalf of al-Azhar, told AFP the network is a “strong appeal against the egotism of rich countries, against materialistic societies which must stop all forms of aggression against the human being”.
“Modern slavery and human trafficking are one of the greatest scandals and a tragedy of our age, which touches every part of the world in some way,” said David John Moxon, who represented Welby.
In 2013, the Walk Free Foundation published a Global Slavery Index, covering all forms of bondage from people trafficking to children forced to wed, which estimated that 29.8 million people live in slavery worldwide.
The west African nation of Mauritania ranked worst for slavery, followed by Haiti and Pakistan.
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