North-South Conference: Building Partnerships for Sustainable Development

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Human Trafficking

Trafficking in human beings is now the fastest-growing business of organized crime. According to recent estimates, more than 700,000 people are trafficked every year for the purposes of sexual exploitation and forced labour. They are transported across borders and sold into modern-day slavery.

From Asian mountain villages to eastern European cities, people are drawn by the prospect of easy money or a well-paid job abroad as a domestic servant, waitress or factory worker. Traffickers and smugglers recruit victims through all kinds of channels; fake advertisements, mail-order bride catalogues and casual acquaintances attract thousands of innocents every day. Upon arrival at their destination, victims' documents are usually taken away and they end up exploited, often forced to pay off alleged debts under the threat of violence. It comes as no surprise, then, that human trafficking serves transnational organized crime. Interpol has sounded the alarm in the international community about the growing volume of human trafficking and smuggling.

Although trafficking in human beings is a global issue, there are no standard data collection procedures that would allow comparative analyses and the design of countermeasures. There is a need to strengthen the criminal justice response to trafficking through legislative reform, awareness-raising and training, as well as through national and international cooperation, but without a clear picture of the dimensions of the problem, it has proven extremely difficult to achieve the levels of cooperation necessary to solve it.

The support and protection of victims who give evidence is key to prosecuting the ringleaders behind the phenomenon.

Source: UN Office on Drugs and Crime, http://www.unodc.org/odccp/trafficking_human_beings.html