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The UN’s missed chance to lead on anti-trafficking [1]
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Date: 2025-06
UN agencies and international organisations have spent countless hours and billions of dollars on the topics of human trafficking and modern slavery over the last decade.
They’ve adopted treaties and protocols. They’ve published handbooks and reports. They’ve collected data, launched prevention initiatives, and run awareness campaigns. And they’ve dispatched experts to verify what countries do in practice.
But has all this helped them form a united voice and demonstrate leadership on the issue? Has significant progress been achieved? The short answer is no. The longer answer is that the results are mixed, but at the very least some lessons have been learned along the way.
Who has been doing what?
After the United Nations’ trafficking protocol was agreed in 2000, UN agencies stood at the forefront in the fight against human trafficking. Since 2014, those organisations have continued to play a role in supporting anti-trafficking efforts, but in a less prominent way.
It was obvious during the first few years that they were squabbling about which agency should take the largest amounts of money. This was clarified in 2010 when the UN adopted a ‘Global Plan of Action to Combat Trafficking in Persons’, drafted principally by Belarus.
The Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), awarded priority status in 2010 and the official custodian of the trafficking protocol, has lead responsibility on human trafficking among UN agencies. Its main activity is to publish findings from its global monitoring every two years, but these are primarily based on data provided by governments about their criminal justice systems’ activities. As such, UNODC reports tell us more about changes in law enforcement priorities and the way forms of exploitation are categorised than they do about the ‘realities’ of trafficking.
The UNODC has published guidelines on ‘difficult’ provisions of the trafficking protocol (such as ‘what constitutes an “abuse of a position of vulnerability”’) and legal guides suggesting specific provisions that countries should include in their anti-trafficking legislation. Occasional publications have criticised the decisions taken by a particular country.
UNODC is the secretariat for the annual sessions of the countries that have ratified the UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime and its protocols (including the trafficking protocol). A decade ago, these sessions discussed a proposal to create an independent monitoring body to check whether countries were doing enough to implement the protocol. This was rejected.
Over the past decades, two different UN funds have also provided small amounts of assistance to people who had been trafficked. One was established in the 1990s on ‘contemporary forms of slavery’, managed by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. Rather than building on this, the UNODC initiated a new fund in 2010.
The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) has been the main international agency with an operational role. In the early 2000s it focused on providing mental health care to trafficked women, particularly those repatriated to their countries of origin before they had received adequate healthcare (e.g., to Moldova). It shared the expertise it gained with others.
It also performed a key role, from the perspective of the governments of countries where foreigners were found to have been trafficked, by organising their return home. Nominally this was always ‘voluntary’, though in practice those concerned usually had no choice. By the time IOM formally became part of the UN in 2016, its main focus was repatriating irregular migrants in general, only a small proportion of whom were known to have been trafficked.
UNICEF, the UN agency focusing on children, documented patterns of child trafficking and published guidelines for governments on how they should care for trafficked children. These were largely disregarded by officials initially, though in recent years there has been movement towards implementing some recommendations (such as the appointment of a guardian for every unaccompanied child suspected of being trafficked).
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[1] Url:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/beyond-trafficking-and-slavery/united-nations-missed-chance-on-anti-trafficking/
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