Reinforcing the criminal justice response to trafficking in persons, especially in some regions.

 

While most regions have recorded increasing detections and convictions since 2020, such as Africa where new legislation was enacted, some regions have not yet recovered to their pre-covid levels, including in some middle and high-income countries. These progresses and setbacks may be explained by various factors, ranging from the existence and applicability of anti-trafficking legislation to the complexity of the cases and the ability of criminal justice practitioners to secure convictions on trafficking charges based on solid evidence. The high level of involvement of organized crime groups, some of which are transnational, and emerging forms of trafficking, including for forced criminality conducted online, raise the evidentiary burden. This may add to the challenges already posed by international cooperation, impacting on the quality of the cases prosecuted, in addition to the number of convictions. The international community and national authorities should analyse legislation and judicial practice in selected countries in order to understand where the obstacles to successful prosecutions lie. They should support and implement remedies at the national level such as legal reform to clarify the trafficking offences as well as training to and exchange of experience among prosecutors and judges, but also defence lawyers, to better understand the evidential requirements of the offence. This includes: how to deal with complex cases that involve transnational organized criminal groups and digital evidence; the impact of trauma and the coping mechanisms that may impact the credibility of victims and witnesses; and enabling the application of sentences that are proportionate to the seriousness of the trafficking offences. 

In Africa, where most convictions seem to focus on small groups or individual traffickers, the international community and donor assistance should focus on the capacity of African countries to address transnational criminal organizations operating on the continent. Destination countries outside of Africa where African victims are exploited should also extend their cooperation to origin countries to stop the trafficking and to prosecute the traffickers. In addition, considering that the large majority of African trafficking victims are detected within Africa, the international community should support regional organizations and national authorities in the development and strengthening of transnational referral mechanisms that build on and complement existing national referral mechanisms so as to improve bilateral and regional coordination in investigations, repatriation and protection of victims. 

Finally, to counter the emergence of trafficking for forced criminality into online scams, national authorities should develop public-private partnerships, particularly with tech companies, to deprive traffickers of access to the technical infrastructure that is required to commit these forms of trafficking, as well as with the financial sector, to enhance the tracking of financial flows and gather digital evidence during investigations.

 Member states and the international community should reiterate and adopt concrete actions to implement paragraph 32 of the Global digital compact, which calls on technology companies and social media platforms to provide online safety-related training materials and safeguards to their users, in particularly children and youth users, and call on social media platforms to establish safe, secure, accessible reporting mechanisms to report policy violations.