Modern Slavery and Trafficking in Human Beings. Most Europeans are convinced, that slavery belongs to an inglorious past. [ Ссылка ] Unfortunately, that is not the case: Trafficking in human beings is not only a contemporary reality, but a global multi-million business at that. In Europe alone, thousands of men, women and children are being traded like any given commodity every year.
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Lured by false promises about professional education or a job elsewhere, they leave their families and homes – only to find themselves sexually exploited, or forced to toil under sometimes inhuman conditions in industrial plants, on farms or in private households.
Convention for Action against Trafficking in Human Beings – and GRETA
With its Convention for Action against Trafficking in Human Beings (CETS No. 197), the Council of Europe has created the first legally binding instrument in Europe to fight the problem of human trafficking comprehensively. The Convention entered into force in 2008 and is open for signature to non-member states of the Council of Europe as well as to member states. It covers every form of trafficking, every type of victim and every sort of exploitation, and focuses on “three P’s”:
Prevent trafficking
Protect the Human Rights of victims of trafficking
Prosecute the traffickers
Monitoring
Since 2009, an independent group of max. 15 experts called GRETA – Group of Experts on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings – is monitoring the situation in the signatory states with regard to the implementation of the Convention and provides support to their governments.
GRETA puts its know-how on combating trafficking in human beings at the disposal of the signatory states. It also regularly visits each signatory state and draws up an evaluation report, on which the government of the country in question is called to comment. The comments are included in the report, which is then published by the Council of Europe.
Based on GRETA’s reports, a Committee of the Parties to the convention – composed of representatives both from the Committee of Ministers and from the non-members of the Council of Europe, who are party to the convention – puts forward recommendations, on which the government of the country in question is invited to comment as well.
Slavery is found in the Bible — the Israelites were slaves in Egypt and we know the extreme hardships they endured.
Closer home and over several centuries, West African and the East Coast African Slave trade thrived.
Countless East Africans were sold as slaves by Muslim Arabs to the Middle East and other places via the Sahara Desert and Indian Ocean.
After 400 years of slavery, the practice was abolished in 1807, but it is more alive today than at any point in human history.
It is estimated that more people are trafficked in one year from Asia alone, than in the entire 400 years of the slave trade. Experts argue it is time for slavery to be discussed more openly.
Following a number of minor declarations on Human Trafficking (HT), it was only in December, 2,000 that the United Nations definition of HT was finally concretised in the Palermo Protocol, Article 3.
It reads as follows: “Trafficking in persons shall mean the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person for the purpose of exploitation.”
Pope Francis has never hidden his concern over the phenomenon of HT which claims millions of victims – women, children and men every year.
As a society, we must face our own complicity in abetting HT. How old is the girl who cleans, cooks and takes care of your family?
Society too tolerates the sex trade and millions of body images of young women, are available on our social media each day. We are saturated with an ‘out-of-control’ porn industry.
HT is the second fastest growing industry globally, following closely behind the firearms industry, which places it in the league of a violent industry.
According to the European Parliament, the annual turnover from HT is more than the total of all military budgets in the world.
Trafficking in persons can be categorised into forced labour, followed by trafficking for sexual purposes and finally for trafficking in organs.
According to the International Labour Organisation, one out of four victims of modern slavery are children, who engage in physical or domestic labour while another chunk are forced into armed conflict as child soldiers.
This affects both boys and girls, the latter being used as sex slaves and cooks for the soldiers.
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