The
European Union promises action on trafficking. “All EU
countries are affected, either as countries of origin, transit
or destination,” the new Justice Commissioner Franco Frattini
told reporters when he was presented with a report by a group
of experts. It was his first initiative since the new executive
took office in late November.
At the end of 2004, human trafficking could claim to be at the
top of Europe’s criminal justice agenda. The key concepts
in the international definition of trafficking are deception
and exploitation.
The Red Cross/Red Crescent Movement has yet to formally adopt
the trafficking protocol; it is primarily a law enforcement
rather than a humanitarian measure. But the detailed, even cumbersome
definition reflects the first problem in addressing trafficking:
deciding who has been trafficked.
The popular perception of trafficking is the sexual exploitation
of women, who travel abroad having been promised supposedly
legitimate work but who find themselves forced into prostitution
by gangsters. But this is not the whole story. Children are
trafficked for a variety of reasons, including sweatshop labour
or, especially if they are below the age of criminal responsibility,
petty crime.
In Denmark, for example, there have been cases of trafficked
labourers – men – being found living illegally in
tents on building sites, poorly fed and even more poorly paid,
if at all.
“Entire industrial sectors in Europe, like tourism, the
service and domestic services, construction and agriculture,
are propped up by migrant workers,” argues Helené
Lackenbauer, the International Federation’s adviser on
population movement. “This creates a demand for smugglers’
services – the traffickers follow.”
The UN protocol also stipulates that the recruitment, transfer
and exploitation of “any person under eighteen years of
age” constitutes trafficking even if no deception is involved,
and it adds organ removal to the possible categories of exploitation.
But as recently as 2002, the UN children’s agency UNICEF
– in a major report on human trafficking in south-east
Europe – said that there is “no general understanding
or acceptance of the definition of trafficking among the institutions
and persons...responsible for anti-trafficking work on the ground.”
The International Organization for Migration (IOM) is in the
front line. “We have developed special interview procedures
intended to uncover whether someone has been trafficked,”
its new head of counter-trafficking, Richard Danziger, told
The Bridge. “We’re preparing a handbook that will
be made available to all interested NGOs this year.”
Some in the Red Cross argue that it is wise not to get too bogged
down in the definitional issue, and that the common-sense concept
of “vulnerability” – which often amounts to
simple judgement at branch level – is most useful in practice.
Not all sex workers have necessarily been trafficked, as UNICEF
points out, and young males are trafficked for sexual exploitation
too.
The 2004 global survey of human trafficking by the US State
Department, the fourth of its kind and widely agreed to be the
single most authoritative source, found that between 600,000
and 800,000 people are trafficked across borders worldwide every
year, though it acknowledged that other agencies put the figure
far higher. Of these, 70 per cent are female and 50 per cent
children, according to the survey, while the majority of women
and girls fall into commercial sex.
For the Red Cross/Red Crescent Movement, 2004 was a watershed
year. The project entitled European RC/RC Cooperation in Response
to Human Trafficking, which is being facilitated at the Danish
Red Cross national headquarters in Copenhagen by the International
Federation’s former regional population movement delegate,
Zsolt Dudas, got under way.
In an attempt to bring clarity and coherence to this complex
area, it launched a wide-ranging exercise in National Society
mapping, designed by Dudas, which should highlight both gaps
and strengths.
Twelve European Red Cross societies had met in the Danish capital
on 3 May, just after the very hour of EU enlargement, to take
up the torch first lit at the Berlin regional conference in
2002.
Lynette Lowndes, head of the International Federation’s
Europe Department, emphasized that the cooperation initiative,
which involves both source and destination countries, reflected
“a new situation for Europe: a shared problem that goes
beyond traditional PNS-ONS distinctions.”
There is no doubt that in the straightforward work of educating
young people about the dangers of phoney job ads or blandishments
from traffickers and their agents, local Red Cross networks
in source countries have much to offer.
“Red Cross and Red Crescent societies can play an essential
role by helping to prevent potential victims from falling prey
to traffickers, and by providing services for returnees,”
Helga Konrad, the OSCE’s special representative on trafficking,
told The Bridge.
National Societies, she added, are also “extremely valuable
in providing information and raising awareness of the risks
of trafficking.”
*This article first appeared in ‘The Bridge’
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