Citation

Bhabha J. Anti-Traffick. Rev. 2015; 4: 3-12.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2015, Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women (GAATW))

DOI

10.14197/atr.20121541

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Anniversaries provide a pretext for reflection--celebration for national independence days, mourning for war-time massacres. For political reforms and legal innovations, anniversaries warrant a different set of reflections: less predictable or uniform, more sober stock taking and weighing of achievements and failures than affirmation of unequivocal success or defeat. This fourth special issue of the Anti-Trafficking Review embraces the occasion of the fifteenth anniversary of the 2000 United Nations (UN) Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children (hereafter Trafficking Protocol), and evaluates the impact of this landmark instrument of international law on the grave social, political and economic problems it targets. Among the many and varied constituencies concerned with issues of trafficking, from government bodies to international advocacy groups to sex worker collectives, the Trafficking Protocol has attracted considerable attention. It has been widely ratified, its definition of trafficking has been extensively invoked, its criminalisation mandates have been aggressively followed, its victim protection measures have been enthusiastically cited.

With this high-profile visibility have come controversy and disagreement. Inevitably, evaluation criteria for anti-trafficking success vary, opinions on the data evidenced by the empirical track record differ and assessments of intervention efficacy diverge. This divergence of views applies to the impact of the Protocol itself as much as it does to the broader domain of anti-trafficking work. The multifaceted social reality implicated in the phenomenon we label human trafficking is the product of a plethora of factors, among which international legal norms and their consequences (regional and domestic) constitute a small part.

Even the task of disentangling the 'consequences' of legal norms--the impact that ratification of any treaty or protocol has on a country--is anything but straightforward.1 Nowhere is this truer than in the trafficking context. Do we have good pre-ratification baseline measures? Do we even agree on the criteria for deciding what counts as success2--are we counting the instances of human exploitation related to trafficking, or the numbers of people who have been trafficked? Are we determining the size of trafficking networks or the profits derived from trafficking, the numbers of arrests, of prosecutions, or of convictions of traffickers? Are we tracking the numbers of people who have been rescued, empowered or protected from the ravages of trafficking, or the numbers of professionals trained to provide appropriate services, or the magnitude of resources available to protect or support trafficked persons? The list is extensive and open-ended...

Language: en

Keywords

trafficking; human trafficking; Palermo Protocol; Trafficking Protocol