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Human Trafficking, the Slavery of the 21st Century

By Luis Almagro

(Translation of the Secretary General’s OP-ED published by El País, Le Nouvelliste and Le Devoir)

Human trafficking is a silent crime, hard to identify and roughly as profitable as drug and illegal arms trafficking. No country is untouched by this crime—a sad and challenging 21st century reality.

Today is the day chosen by the United Nations to remind us of the moral precariousness in which we live at an incalculable cost— human dignity.

Human trafficking subjects men, women, and children, many lured by their dreams and hopes for a better life, to exploitation of all types, comparable to slavery.

According to data from the International Labour Organization (ILO), more than 20 million people are subjected to forced labor (including sexual exploitation) around the world. Nearly 2 million of which million are in Latin America and the Caribbean.

The vast majority of these people are exploited by businesses or individuals. Approximately 4.5 million are sexually exploited, while nearly 70 percent are forced to work in areas ranging from agriculture and construction to manufacturing and household jobs.

Women and girls represent the majority of the victims of labor exploitation (11.4 million, 55%), compared with 9.5 million (45%) men and boys, although boys represent 26% of the total (5.5 million child victims).

The figures are shocking and failing to act against this 21st century barbarity implies moral complicity.

Since taking office as Secretary General of the OAS, I have proclaimed that my goal during the next years will be “more rights for more people” in the Americas.

There is nothing more appropriate to guide our common work in the defense and protection of millions of such vulnerable people. To that end, among other things, we will create a Secretariat of Access to Rights and Equality that will work on these and other areas of exclusion.

There is a commitment by the countries of this hemisphere to confront this scourge, with strategies for prevention and the protection of victims and the punishment of those responsible.

This commitment must be translated into continuous action.
In 2000, the Convention against Transnational Organized Crime and its Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children was approved.

In much of the hemisphere, human trafficking was not even defined in national laws and the legal frameworks were limited or nearly nonexistent.

Fifteen years later, countries have legal instruments that, in addition to punishing traffickers, protect the rights of victims. We have moved from a restricted vision of exploitation being confined to prostitution to one in which the various forms this crime takes are recognized.

And so, thousands of traffickers are in jail, and thousands of victims have been able to remake their lives. But it is not enough.

We now have a clear Work Plan to Combat Trafficking in Persons in the Western Hemisphere for the 2015-2018 period, approved by all the member countries of the OAS.

Preventing the crime means making potential victims less vulnerable through the creation of economic and social opportunities. If opportunities continue to depend on social condition, gender, race, or where one was born, traffickers will continue to flourish.

Conversely, the crime must be made more evident, and therefore, more often reported; its authors must be held responsible and punished appropriately; and people victimized by criminal networks must be protected, aided and made capable of rebuilding their lives.

Governments cannot do this alone. Civil society, the private sector, unions, and churches must be part of a coalition that defeats this scourge and restores to millions of human beings their violated rights.

Simply put, we cannot accept a world in which dreams, rights and freedom are bought and sold.

Reference: S-031/15