3071-The political economy of new slavery

56 Trafficking and International Law
However, it is clear that the restrictions and difficulties in place
encourage people to take more risks in their desire to migrate and this
puts them at risk of trafficking. According to a UN news article there are
more than 185 million international or ‘non-national’ migrants in the
world, and of these 50 per cent are women. 2 The IOM estimates that
there will be more than 230 million people outside of their countries of
origin by 2050. As many of these migrants are illegal such statistics
have a high margin of error and the general difficulties in obtaining
reliable statistics for both migration and trafficking are discussed later.
Historically there were very few restrictions on migration but the
international community was concerned about the continuation of the
slave trade, which could be seen as the forerunner of trafficking today.
Prior to the existence of the League of Nations the first efforts made
by the international community to prohibit the slave trade was the
Brussels Act of 1890, to which 18 European states were signatory. The
Act contained effective measures to control and prevent the slave trade.
It provided for a Slavery Bureau to oversee this process and to subject
the sea routes preferred by slave traders to naval patrolling. Article XVIII
of the Brussels Act provided that a ‘strict supervision shall be organized
by the local authorities at the ports and in the countries adjacent to the
coast, with the view of preventing the sale and shipment of slaves...’.
Today, it is increasingly difficult to monitor and control the traffic in
persons given the dramatic increase in global migration. Following this,
the Covenant of the League of Nations adopted on 28 April 1919 called
on member states not only to ensure fair and human conditions of
employment for all, but also to work towards the suppression of traffic
in women and children for the purpose of sexual exploitation. Later in
the twentieth century, international instruments on trafficking focused
on cases in which women and girls were moved across frontiers without
their consent for the purposes of prostitution. These included the
Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic of Women and Children
of 1921 and the Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic of Women
of Full Age of 1933. Both these instruments established a duty to prohibit,
prevent and punish the trafficking of women regardless of the
question of consent. This wish to criminalize the recruitment of women
of one country to be prostitutes in another was continued with the
adoption of the 1949 Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in
Persons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others. The inextricable
linkage of trafficking to prostitution in these conventions meant
that the procurement of people for any other purpose than sexual
exploitation was not really covered. The reality today is that people are