By Allison Hollabaugh, Counsel From September 11 to September 22, 2017, the OSCE participating States meet in Warsaw, Poland, for the Human Dimension Implementation Meeting (HDIM).  The HDIM is Europe’s largest annual human rights event. Over the course of two weeks, the 57 participating States will discuss compliance with consensus-based commitments on full range of fundamental freedoms, democracy, tolerance and nondiscrimination, and humanitarian concerns. As traffickers seek to lure adolescents into exploitation, holistic anti-trafficking education of teachers and children directly in schools is emerging as a critical tool to fight modern day slavery across the OSCE region.  Education has long been used in the prevention of human trafficking, the first of “3 Ps”—prevention, prosecution, and protection—around which most of the OSCE participating States have structured their laws to combat trafficking in human beings.  For instance, embassies and consulates include trafficking warnings and trafficking hotlines in information to individuals seeking visas, especially those individuals coming to be domestic servants. Tourists are educated in airports about the legal penalties of sexually exploiting vulnerable children.  Flight attendants and hotel operators are trained in how to recognize and safely report potential trafficking victims. Members of the law enforcement community are educated in the procedures for identifying trafficking victims among migrant and refugee flows through programs like the OSCE Extra Budgetary Project, which successfully concluded its third training last week in Vicenza, Italy.  International organizations have targeted aid for trafficking awareness education in countries where severe lack of economic opportunity makes teens extremely vulnerable to sham offers of jobs abroad. However, traffickers are increasingly preying upon children’s social vulnerability, not just economic need.  Social vulnerability—such as feelings of alienation, unresolved emotional or physical abuse, learning disabilities, or unfamiliarity with a new culture and language—means that children of every socio-economic background across participating States are at risk of being taken advantage of by traffickers.  Children’s often unlimited and unmonitored access to the internet can also endanger them.  Traffickers scout social media with fake profiles, looking for children they can extort into trafficking.  A child sends a half-naked photo to their “new friend” on social media, who then threatens to send the photos to the child’s parents and friends—unless the child does as they say.  No child is immune, but some are now smarter than their would-be traffickers. Non-governmental organizations in the United States and United Kingdom have been taking prevention to new heights through programs to train children in schools how to avoid being ensnared by human traffickers.  The Frederick Douglass Family Initiatives PROTECT project, and Just Enough UK, to name a few, have pioneered curricula that helps children—and their teachers—navigate the new faces and ploys of modern day slavery. Including age-appropriate, anti-trafficking education of teachers and school children in the standard curriculum for all children means that the suffering and harm caused by human trafficking can be halted early—or avoided altogether.  At a recent hearing in the U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, Co-Founder and Executive Vice President of the Frederick Douglass Family Initiatives, Robert Benz, observed, “The cost benefits to taxpayers, for preventing or mitigating human trafficking at an early stage, are enormous. The human benefit for preventing someone from being victimized is incalculable.” Such educational initiatives may soon benefit from new federal government grants in the United States.  Helsinki Commission Co-Chairman Rep. Christopher Smith, Special Representative for Human Trafficking Issues to the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly and author of the U.S. laws that establish and fund the “3Ps”, included in the new Frederick Douglass Trafficking Victims Prevention and Protection Reauthorization Act (H.R. 2200) authority for the training of teachers and students to recognize and avoid human trafficking.  H.R. 2200 passed the House of Representatives in July and awaits consideration in the U.S. Senate.

By Allison Hollabaugh, Counsel Headlines in the United States last week were filled with the horrific tragedy in San Antonio, Texas, where at 10 lives were lost and 20 others hospitalized with heat stroke after dozens of migrants were trapped inside the stifling trailer of a truck.  More would have died on their road to a new life if someone from the truck had not bravely sought water from Walmart employees. Newspapers and some officials across the country were quick to headline the tragedy as a “human trafficking crime”—but soon corrected “trafficking” to “smuggling.”  Why?  Smuggling and trafficking are different crimes requiring different responses.  (There are not yet enough facts available in this case to determine if any of the migrants also were victims of trafficking.)  Confusing the terms does the vast majority of trafficking victims no favors, and in fact makes it more likely that trafficking victims in need of rescue will be overlooked. Smuggling vs. Trafficking The defining characteristic of human smuggling is transportation and is generally defined by the Department of Homeland Security as “importation of people into the United States involving deliberate evasion of immigration laws,” including moving irregular migrants across national borders as well as “unlawful  transportation and harboring” of irregular migrants already in the United States. By contrast, while transportation does occur in many human trafficking cases, human trafficking does not require movement.  The defining characteristic of human trafficking centers on commercial exploitation akin to slavery.  Specifically, human trafficking is defined in U.S. law as: Sex trafficking in which a commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud or coercion, or in which the person induced to perform such act has not attained 18 years of age; or Recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision or obtaining of a person for labor or services, through the use of force, fraud or coercion for the purpose of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage or slavery. The Palermo Protocol to Prevent, Suppress, and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children, which has been ratified by all of the Participating States of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), echoes the “exploitation” focus above, specifically stating that “Trafficking in Persons” means the following: [T]he 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. Exploitation shall include, at a minimum, the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labour or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs[.] Irregular migrants are particularly vulnerable due to their undocumented status, and may suffer human trafficking en route to or after arrival in the destination country.  Some smuggling networks overlap with trafficking networks or deliver irregular migrants to traffickers.  Migrants who voluntarily enter a country outside regular channels are sometimes saddled with huge “debts” by the smugglers, who then force them into debt bondage—a form of human trafficking.  As the Special Representative on Human Trafficking Issues to the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly, Rep. Chris Smith, noted in his recent report to the annual session, the overlap of smuggling and trafficking networks in OSCE region is particularly notable among migrants originating in African countries.  He noted that the International Organization for Migration reported last year that 80% of arrivals from Nigeria may have been victims of sex trafficking, forced labor, and/or trafficking for the purpose of organ removal.  Gambians, Ghanaians, Guineans, and Ivorians—especially the youth—also had strong indicators of human trafficking.  Identification and Protection of Trafficking Victims The difficulty for border guards and law enforcement is discerning who among irregular migrants actually needs rescue from a trafficker and access to rehabilitative services. The United States and many other OSCE participating states conduct special anti-trafficking training for border guards.  Given the current influx of migrants into the OSCE region and resulting expansion of law enforcement contacts with irregular migrants, the Special Representative and Co-ordinator to Combat Trafficking in Human Beings for the OSCE, Amb. Medina Jarbussynova, has initiated and implemented a special Extra Budgetary Project to train law enforcement who come in contact with irregular migrants how to identify trafficking victims.  In the United States, a foreign national who is likely a victim of human trafficking is offered the same level of care and services that is offered to refugees.  Likely victims are also offered temporary legal status and the opportunity to apply for a T non-immigrant visa. The number of these visas, as well as the funding for assistance is limited—underscoring the need to identify among irregular migrant populations which individuals are in need of special services.  However, the vast majority of trafficking victims found in the United States are not irregular migrants, or otherwise foreign nationals.  In 2016, the United States identified nearly 800 foreign nationals in need of special assistance due to suspected trafficking in the United States.  This is in contrast to the 3,732 U.S. citizens and Legal Permanent Residents who received special services as trafficking victims. The disparity in numbers may be because it is more difficult to find foreign national victims.  However, it is more likely due to the persistent truth that trafficking victims are just as likely, if not more likely, to be citizens, or otherwise legally present, in the country in which they live. At the beginning of the anti-trafficking movement about 20 years ago, advocates and law enforcement were looking for enslaved irregular migrants.  It gradually became apparent that the trafficking suffered by foreign nationals was also happening to citizens, it was just called something different, like “child prostitution” or a “labor violation.”  Law enforcement began to see, and respond appropriately, to domestic human trafficking. Anti-trafficking advocates still struggle to educate policy makers, police, prosecutors, judges, social welfare agencies, and communities to recognize human trafficking in all its forms. The manifestations of exploitation are many and constantly changing; it can look like a child begging on a corner, a woman unable to leave the home where she is a domestic servant, a young girl forced to participate in the making of pornography, a foster kid engaged in survival sex on the street, the busboy at a restaurant, a woman working in a nail salon, a door to door salesman, a legal visa holder advertised as an escort online—or an irregular migrant smuggled not to freedom but into trafficking. Focusing primarily on exploitation rather than origin or movement as the core feature of human trafficking will ensure that the United States and OSCE Participating States continue to correctly identify and help more trafficking victims become survivors every year. 

By Allison Hollabaugh, Counsel Human trafficking remains a pressing human rights violation around the world with the International Labor Organization estimating that nearly 21 million people are enslaved at any given time, most of them women and children. As part of U.S. efforts to combat human trafficking, the U.S. Department of State today released the 2017 Trafficking in Persons Report (TIP Report), reflecting the efforts of 187 countries and territories to prosecute traffickers, prevent trafficking, and to identify and assist victims, as described by the Palermo Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children. Trafficking Victim Identification and Care: Regional Perspectives According to the new TIP Report, in the 2016 reporting year, countries in the OSCE region identified 304 more trafficking victims than in the previous year, for a total of 11,416 victims.  This increase is particularly notable when compared to the East Asia and Pacific, Near East, South and Central Asia, and Western Hemisphere regions, where victim identification declined, but still maintained a generally upward trend over 2014.  Trafficking victim identification and care is critical for proper management of refugee and migrant flows.  In order to help law enforcement and border guards identify trafficking victims among the nearly 400,000 migrants and refugees entering the region last year, the OSCE Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Human Beings launched a new project to conduct multiple trainings, including simulation exercises, through 2018.  The first training in November 2016 included participants from 30 OSCE participating States. Victim identification and care are also critical for successful prosecutions.  Nearly every region of the world saw a drop in prosecutions of human traffickers, but an increase in convictions in the 2016 reporting year.  This trend may reflect a growing knowledge among prosecutors of how to successfully investigate and prosecute a trafficking case.  It also may reflect an overall increase in trafficking victims who have been identified, permitted to remain in-country, and cared for such that the victims—now survivors—are ready, willing, and able to testify against their traffickers.  Despite the dramatic decline in prosecutions (46 percent) in the OSCE region, convictions held steady at nearly the same numbers as the previous year. Individual Country Narratives Along with regional statistics, the TIP Report also provides individual country narratives, recommendations for the most urgent changes needed to eliminate human trafficking, and an assessment of whether the country is making significant efforts to meet the minimum standards for the elimination of human trafficking. Tier 1 countries meet the minimum standards for the elimination of human trafficking. Tier 2 countries do not yet meet the standards, but are making significant efforts to do so.  Tier 2 Watch List countries do not meet the minimum standards and are making significant efforts to do so, but have a very large or increasing number of trafficking victims, have failed to demonstrate increasing efforts over the previous year, or lack a solid plan to take additional steps in the coming year. Tier 3 countries do not meet the minimum standards and are not making significant efforts to do so. Twenty-five OSCE participating States qualified for Tier 1 in the TIP Report.  Nineteen participating States qualified for Tier 2, including Ukraine, which was upgraded this year after four years on the Tier 2 Watch List.  Five participating States were designated for the Tier 2 Watch List, including Hungary, Moldova, Montenegro, Serbia, and Bulgaria.* Four participating States were on Tier 3, including Belarus, Russia, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.  States on Tier 3 may be subject to sanctions. Legislation authored by Helsinki Commission Co-Chairman Rep. Chris Smith—who also serves as the Special Representative for Human Trafficking Issues to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe Parliamentary Assembly – requires the TIP Report to be produced every year.  In recent years the report has also included an assessment of the United States.   Since the inception of the report, more than 100 countries have written or amended their trafficking laws, with some nations openly crediting the report for inspiring progress in their countries’ fight against human trafficking. * OSCE participating States Andorra, Monaco, Lichtenstein, and San Marino are not included in the TIP Report.