A new initiative was launched this week to fight human trafficking globally.
”This is the largest initiative ever launched of this sort,” said the executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Antonio Maria Costa, in an interview.
”It is meant to create a framework for the other disjointed initiatives which have taken place so far. We are talking about creating a context where every initiative will be made more relevant and, as a consequence, more far-reaching in terms of impact.”
The initiative kicked off with an awareness-building campaign that will last through this year. The initiative aims to arm itself with a fund to take the campaign forward early next year.
”We are still in a preparatory stage,” Costa said. ”The launch of our global initiative is meant to make people aware that there is so much going on. We need to bring together the freedom fighters, the fighters for the freedom of other people in this exercise, and we want to create a fund that will be triggered at the beginning of 2008.”
Epidemic
The UNODC says the problem has reached ”epidemic proportions over the past decade”. Most of the victims are women and young girls, many of whom are forced into prostitution or otherwise exploited sexually.
The launch of the initiative on Monday coincides with the 200th anniversary of the abolition of transatlantic slave trade and the bicentennial of the abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire. A series of events throughout the world will culminate in Vienna with an International Conference against Human Trafficking from November 27 to 29 this year, the UNODC said in a statement.
About 2,5-million people throughout the world are at any given time recruited, entrapped, transported and exploited, according to estimates of international experts.
Trafficking in persons, whether for sexual exploitation or forced labour, affects virtually every region of the world, the report says.
But, the UNODC adds, ”because human trafficking is an underground crime, with many undiscovered and unidentified victims, the true numbers are not known. The United States government estimates that between 600 000 and 800 000 people are trafficked across international borders each year.”
Human trafficking has become big business, the report says. The UN estimates the total market value of illicit human trafficking at $32-billion. Of this, about $10-billion is derived from the initial ”sale” of individuals, with the remainder representing the estimated profits from the activities or goods produced by the victims of this barbaric crime.
No borders
The problem is not confined to just a few regions, Costa said. ”The problem of human trafficking and the resulting forms of modern slavery is a problem which knows no border, it has no passport.” But, he said, ”if you look at the root causes, you understand better where the problem is geographically located”.
To a very large extent, ”the first cause is socio-economic conditions which make people vulnerable and which make them available for anything, including the risk of falling prey to traffickers and therefore becoming modern slaves”, Costa said. ”Secondly, in some cultures fathers sell their daughters in the face of socio-economic hardships. It becomes a gigantic problem of vulnerability.”
The trade is fed by the demand side. ”You have people looking for exotic sex, or for cheap carpets or cheap commodities which are produced by little boys and little girls with their little hands. We had some time back the cases of very important producers of sports goods, we knew they were manufactured by hand in villages in slave conditions, so we have a serious range of problems.”
Asked about trafficking from East Europe to Western Europe, Costa said the economic hardship in Eastern Europe, especially the former Soviet Union countries, ”has created the wish to migrate under any conditions, and organised crime is taking advantage of this desire to find a job and a good job, and especially girls, very beautiful as these girls from Eastern Europe are, become very vulnerable to trafficking.”
But, he added, Europe is only one of the regions where trafficking takes place, ”and I don’t want to single out Eastern Europe”.
A recent UNODC report, Trafficking in Persons: Global Patterns, identifies Thailand, China, Nigeria, Albania, Bulgaria, Belarus, Moldova and Ukraine among the countries that are the greatest sources of trafficked persons. Thailand, Japan, Israel, Belgium, The Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Turkey and the United States are cited as the most common destinations.
Protocol
The UN Protocol against Trafficking in Persons, in effect since December 2003, makes human trafficking a crime. The protocol has been signed and ratified by more than 110 countries, yet the participating governments and their criminal justice systems have not effectively curbed the practice, the UNODC says.
”Few criminals are convicted, and most victims never receive help — on the contrary, many victims themselves are convicted of offences such as illegal entry or unlawful residence.”
The foremost partners in the new initiative will be governments ”because governments are the stakeholders; they are directly able to put an end to this trafficking”, Costa said.
”What we are trying to do with this initiative is to confront countries, saying, ‘You signed that; you now have to comply with it.’ We will provide the resources, hopefully, to help countries to do that, in terms of domestic legislation, in terms of criminalisation of traffickers, in terms of rescuing the victims, in terms of prevention where there are vulnerable people who could become victims.”
The initiative will work also with religious organisations and ”especially civil society organisations; they have been our ears, our eyes on the ground in identifying conditions where victims are being held, helping in rescue operations and so forth”.
A big part of new resources to fight trafficking will go to civil society organisations, he said. — IPS