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Towards the eradication of trafficking in Human Beings
“Data collected by EUROSTAT for the Commission show that women and girls make up nearly 80% of the victims in the EU; that three quarters of victims were trafficked for sexual exploitation. So trafficking clearly has a gender dimension. We also know that most victims within the EU came from Romania and Bulgaria. Victims from outside of the European Union mainly come from Nigeria and China. Furthermore, we see that internal trafficking, where victims are EU citizens being trafficked within their own or another Member State is on the rise.”, Cecilia Malmström, EU Commissioner for Home Affairs, said on Thursday , during an event organized for the 6th EU Anti-Trafficking day, in Brussels.
According to her, there is “a growing consensus within the EU, perhaps even globally, around three major ideas.
First - our obligation to act: Trafficking in human beings is the slavery of our times. It is a severe violation of the most basic human right – individual freedom - and a horrific crime. It cannot be tolerated in any form, be it in Europe – or anywhere else in the world. It implies an obligation, moral as well as legal, to act.
European citizens back that idea strongly. In a recent Eurobarometer poll (from June 2012) 93 percent of EU citizens said they want EU member states to invest in cooperation against trafficking in human beings. Economic crisis and tighter budgets have not undermined popular support for our shared value of protecting the human rights of our societies' most vulnerable persons.
In fact, it is exactly in times of economic turbulence that we need to invest in fighting human trafficking: because economic hardship increases the vulnerability of victims to traffickers, because it is less costly to prevent the problem now than to deal with traffickers through the courts and take victims through protection and assistance programs later, and because actions to prevent human trafficking do not need to be particularly costly. It is very much about stronger policy coordination; better cooperation between public and private sector actors, guidelines on how to identify victims; and a better knowledge base about the problem.
Second - the need for a comprehensive approach: it is simply impossible to address human trafficking in a meaningful way unless we work at the same time on prevention, prosecution of traffickers, and protection of and assistance to victims. I will come back to this in a minute, when speaking about the recent EU Strategy against human trafficking.
Third – the importance of working together: that comprehensive approach can only work, however, if actors from many different sectors work together. During the EU Anti-Trafficking Day last year, the Heads of all Justice and Home Affairs EU Agencies signed a Joint Statement to increase cooperation on trafficking in human beings. This was an important step, but we need to go wider. Fortunately, I see in the room today decision makers, policy makers, law enforcement officers, victim support workers, migration experts, activists, artists and more. The Commission will continue working in the coming years to create stronger partnerships with international organisations, with civil society organisations, with the private sector and other stakeholders.
So, if the consensus and the political will, is there to work together against human trafficking in the EU – what is the way forward in practice? What are the most important actions we have to take?
At EU level, we have two strong tools to guide us: there is the EU Directive on human trafficking about to enter into force in all Member States, and there is the recently adopted EU Strategy against human trafficking.”