The Traffic of Human Beings Phenomenon

The traffic of human beings is a global phenomenon that refers to all ages and sexes, but a large part of the persons implicated in the traffic with human beings is women and children. That is why the specific aspects of the person’s gender and children’s vulnerability should be considered.

The victims are trafficked through numerous means of coercion or methods of hoaxing for countless abusive and exploitation scopes. It has been observed that the majority of the victims traded from Eastern to Central and Western Europe and also to North America and Asia, are women trafficked for forced prostitution. Although due to the surreptitious character of this crime, any available statistic or data does not denote the real state of the things.

The traffic in purposes other than prostitution, such as forced marriages and forced labour etc, does not attract enough attention of the law organs; therefore the capacity of the victims to get help is limited.

The politics and the laws of many countries have the tendency to reduce the possibility of taking some complex measures on the matter of the problem of traffic with intent of forced prostitution. Although, in the last decade, within the framework of international debates and especially in the contents of UN documents, has appeared a certainty that the purposes for which the human beings are trafficked and the modalities in which it is done are different and permanently changing, the base elements of this type of traffic remain the same. Thus, a common accord which regards the definition of traffic, including both the one with women and with men with whatever abusive and enforced purpose, was arrived at.

The first international definition of the human beings’ traffic was elaborated within the UN Convention against trans-national organized crime; the prevention, suppression and sanction of traffic with persons (especially women and children) protocol was adopted by the General Assembly in November 2000.

This document will offer a standard description of the characteristics of the traffic with human beings followed by general conclusions for prevention and control of this crime. Also, this will present, as was said before, the statutory definition of the traffic with human beings established at the UN Convention against trans-national organized crime. The state provisions regulated by this Protocol will be highlighted as will follow.

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