Without fanfare, Hillary Clinton released her plan to end modern slavery – the buying and selling of human beings that happens on a daily basis in America and around the world. Her leadership on this issue goes back decades.

Hillary is not a newcomer to this issue. She has been working on this vexing problem for more than 20 years, a growing phenomenon that has illicitly trapped millions of people into numbing forms of slavery.

During her most famous speech in Beijing in 1994, she identified this burgeoning global issue:

“It is a violation of human rights when women and girls are sold into the slavery for the purposes of prostitution.”

Hillary was catapulted onto the world stage again in 1999 in Istanbul when she delivered a seminal speech on trafficking as a problem confronting the member states of the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe:

“Finally, trafficking of women and children has emerged out of the shadows and into the spotlight. We must prevent it, protect the victims and prosecute the perpetrators to the full extent of the law.”

I witnessed this thoughtful and groundbreaking speech, which also included an announcement of a $1 million US government grant to the OSCE to combat human trafficking. As a State Department employee working for the OSCE, I organized this premiere event at a Head of State Ministerial meeting, which was also attended by a number of luminaries including the foreign minister of Norway, the president of the Swiss Federation, the Latvian prime minister, and NGO leaders.

It was my first time meeting Hillary and she was nothing but gracious and expressed her gratitude for my work in organizing the event.

I was deeply inspired. I had never heard such a detailed speech about human trafficking before. I was struck by her humanity and compassion for the victims, especially in her description of a 12-year-old who had been sold into sexual slavery and consequently was dying of AIDS.

Hillary’s Istanbul speech led me to expose a human trafficking ring that was operating in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The story I broke on these crimes in 2001 later inspired a major motion picture titled The Whistleblower, starring Rachel Weiss and Vanessa Redgrave.

I doubt I would have understood the gravity of the crimes that took place in Bosnia if not for hearing Hillary speak. For a number of years, this issue was simply passed off as inevitable prostitution, but her speech disabused anyone of that notion. I look back at it as a turning point in a coordinated global response to human trafficking.

Following that seminal speech, Hillary advanced the issue by working with Congress and the State Department, resulting in the adoption of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act in 2000. It included a State Department annual Trafficking in Persons report for each country in the world, including the United States.

Today, it is estimated that more than 20 million people are trafficked annually – bought and sold by criminal enterprises enslaving men, women and children for the purposes of domestic servitude, enforced and bonded labor, child labor, sex trafficking and forced marriage.

Hillary wrote this week:

“It’s one of the great evils of our world. And it happens just about everywhere on Earth — including in big cities and small towns across America. So it’s not a remote problem. It’s part of our lives, our economy, our communities.”

Her prodigious work in identifying and addressing the vexing problem modern day slavery is one more reason to elect her president.