3071-The political economy of new slavery

64 Trafficking and International Law
UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially
Women and Children, supplementing the United Nations Convention against
Transnational Organized Crime. There is a separate Protocol Against the
Smuggling of Migrants by Land, Sea and Air. The definition used in this
new UN protocol represents the first internationally agreed definition of
trafficking. Article 3 (a) states:
‘Trafficking in persons’ shall mean 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. 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.
Italics added
By December 2002 the protocol had been signed by 115 states and ratified
by 21. It will formally come into force 90 days after it has been ratified
by a minimum of 40 states. As the initial speed of government signature
has been very swift, it was hoped that this might occur during 2003.
This definition is useful because it distinguishes ‘traffickers’ who use
‘force, deception or coercion’ in order to transport people ‘for the
purpose of exploitation’, from those involved in facilitating irregular
migration or those smuggling victims of persecution from one country
to another. This is a most important distinction and one that has, to date,
been both incorrectly and probably deliberately muddled or ignored
by many UK and other government spokespeople. They confuse the
difference between people who have paid someone to facilitate their
movement from one country to another, either as an asylum seeker or
as an economic migrant, and those who have been trafficked by use of
force or deception. Gallagher (2002) suggests that the protocols referring
to trafficking in persons and smuggling of migrants allow states to
divide deserving ‘victims of trafficking’ from undeserving ‘partners in
smuggling’ without actually providing ‘any guidance on how trafficked
persons and smuggled migrants are to be identified as belonging to
either of these categories’. As is so often the way in areas of slavery-like
exploitation many cases of trafficking do not and will not fit the classic
model of trafficking. Anderson and O’Connell Davidson (2002) point