The multi-billion dollar trafficking of human beings has surged in recent years and is now favoured over drugs by smugglers, the world’s largest regional security group OSCE said on Thursday.
The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, holding a conference here on the human dimension of security, also warned that people smuggling is on the rise despite increasing efforts to combat the illicit business, and that ”urgent measures” are needed to eradicate the scourge.
”Every year millions of men, women and children are trafficked world-wide into conditions amounting to slavery,” Portuguese Ambassador to Thailand Tadeu Soares, representing the OSCE chairman-in-office, told the gathering of 150 specialists and diplomats.
”In fact, it seems that nowadays traffickers are preferring human trade for prostitution to drugs trade due to the less risks involved,” he said, adding that the European Police Office estimates the high-profit business is now worth ”several billion dollars a year”.
He said the OSCE area, which comprises 55 states in Europe and its extremity areas, particularly the Balkans, is of primary concern as human smuggling increases there despite increasing efforts to combat it.
”As in many regions of the OSCE area, this dimension of security is also of extreme importance for most of the Asian continent,” he added.
The era of globalisation, he said, has allowed for the rise of transnational organised crime, ”setting new threats to the safety of people and hampering countries in their social, economic and cultural development.”
While Soares called for ”urgent measures” to fight trafficking, the conference was expected to produce formulas for prevention rather than concrete solutions.
Thailand became an OSCE cooperation partner in 2000.
In his opening address, Minister to the Prime Minister’s Office, Krasae Chanawongse, said Thailand was prepared to host OSCE training activities, which would be open to Southeast Asian nations and their regional security partners.
Earlier this month the US Department of State released a damning ”Trafficking in Persons” report, which said up to four million people were bought and sold in the slave trade in the last year. – Sapa-AFP