The PROTECT project is a 3-year (2023-2026), €4 million intervention funded by the European Union (EU) and implemented by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), focusing on countering migrant smuggling and trafficking in human beings (including children) in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and Tajikistan. The project focuses on numerous aspects of migration, mobility and forced displacement in the selected countries, while examining horizontal challenges in the broader region of Central Asia (Kyrgyz Republic, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan) that hinder efforts to better counter both crimes. |
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Outcome 1: Providing evidence-based strategy, policy and legal expertise
This component will support the development of more effective prevention strategies that use crime prevention principles and are linked along TIP and SOM routes, where possible involving more than one project country. Emphasis will be placed on establishing and strengthening realistic mechanisms for inter-agency cooperation. |
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Outcome 2: Investing in people: building rights-based and gender equal operational capacity to break the TIP and SOM business model
This component will draw on UNODC’s wider capacity building expertise to ensure that all activities are located within a clear and realistic capacity building strategy, taking into account not just knowledge and skills of individual practitioners but also wider institutional issues ranging from rotation policies to resource availability to political will and cross-border cooperation mechanisms. |
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Outcome 3: Activating agency-to-agency communication and facilitating bilateral and international cooperation
The project will support both formal and informal judicial cooperation in a number of ways, it will place particular emphasis on the development of fast, less formal channels of communication and cooperation at an operational level along selected routes. |
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Outcome 4: Supporting the identification, screening, referral and protection of victims of trafficking and migrants in vulnerable situations to exploitation and abuse
Support will be provided to establish or improve identification procedures and referral mechanisms for victims of trafficking in persons, vulnerable smuggled migrants, and other vulnerable migrants. |