Trafficking is the third largest illegal world trade after drugs and guns and is constantly increasing. To most people in Europe, trafficking is synonymous with prostitution. However, human trafficking covers economic gain from other human beings, be it illegal adoption, trafficking in human organs, organised begging, forced marriages, labour or domestic slavery.
23/01/2006 ::
According to the UN, trafficking in persons is characterised by the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, 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.
Norway signed the Council of Europe’s Convention on trafficking at the third Summit in May 2005. The Convention is an efficient instrument in preventing and fighting trafficking through protection of victims and safeguarding of their rights, and prosecution of the traffickers. The Convention applies to all types of trafficking, whoever the victim, and whatever the form of exploitation. The Convention will enter into force when 10 countries have ratified.
The fall of the communist regimes in eastern Europe, the wars on Balkan, high unemployment rates with the according impoverishment has, together with strighter immigration policies to the European Union, contributed to the great boost in trafficking the last decade.
Under the Romanian Chairmanship i 2006, the Council of Europe will launch a major campaign against trafficking in human beings. This will be done in close collaboration with OSCE.