Human Rights Council
Human Trafficking
Human trafficking is the practice of people (including children) being removed from their country through trickery, and forced into labor or prostitution, on highly exploitative terms. This practice has many commonalities with slavery and is illegal in most countries. This criminal industry is extremely fast growing, earning 5 to 9 billion dollars per year. Forced labor globally generates 31 billion dollars per year. Human rights are certainly being violated as most people are lured with fake promises, threatened, or forced out of their country physically, usually by smaller groups, but in some countries such as Russia, Hong Kong, Japan and Colombia, large organizations are responsible. Anyone can be targeted from any country, religious, social, or economic situation, however the majority of victims are usually weak, powerless and vulnerable minorities, poor, or refugees. Women in particular are targeted for the sex industry, being forced to become prostitutes, and children, in some situations are either sold, by their poor parents to traffickers, or, for instance in Africa, Asia and South America, picked up by traffickers after they had been orphaned, often by the AIDS epidemic. Victims are highly exploited, raped, beaten, drugged and have horrible living conditions.
It is reported that there are 27 million modern-day slaves across the world, 800,000 of them being trafficked across U.S. borders every year. 80 percent of the victims (globally) are women and children. The majority of trafficked females are sold into the sex industry.
Prosecution is fairly rare, therefore more awareness must be brought to this extreme violation of human rights in order to improve the situation, with the ultimate goal of ending the human trafficking industry, which is extensive over numerous countries. There is work being done in the UN to stop human trafficking, including the Palermo Protocol which calls for prevention, suppression and punishment involving human trafficking in people, especially women and children, and has been signed by 117 countries (as of September 2008). A group within the ODHIR (Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights), the Office of the Special Representative and Coordinator for Combating the Trafficking of Human Beings, has been raising public awareness, and political will to tackle the issues involving human rights, as well as the illegality of labor and sex trafficking.