Executive Director/Director General
25 July 2016
Excellencies,
Ladies and gentlemen,
Thank you for joining us for this event to mark the 2016 World Day Against Trafficking in Persons.
I would also like to thank our distinguished panellists for their participation.
This day to call attention to the plight of trafficking victims is needed more than ever.
The international community is struggling with what UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has called the biggest refugee and migration crisis since the Second World War.
Meanwhile, human traffickers, as well as migrant smugglers, are taking advantage of misery to turn a huge profit.
Criminals prey on vulnerable people in need and without support, and they see migrants, especially women and children, as easy targets for exploitation, violence and abuse.
Armed conflicts and humanitarian crises expose those caught in the crossfire to increased risk of being trafficked for sexual exploitation, forced labour, organ removal, servitude and other forms of slavery.
The scope of the violence and criminal exploitation the world has witnessed appears to know no bounds.
An ongoing investigation by Italian authorities into smuggling groups operating in the Mediterranean has found that these criminals are highly organized, working together to manage most of the business in this region.
Migrants who can pay are crammed into boats and shipped out. Thousands of children, men and women have died on these perilous sea crossings, while the criminals responsible escape justice.
The terrible fate of migrants who run out of money and cannot pay the smugglers thousands of dollars is beyond imagination.
Investigators have uncovered evidence suggesting that these people are being sold, fifteen thousand dollars per person, to other criminal groups, who kill them and harvest their organs for sale.
While not all migrants are vulnerable to being trafficked, the forthcoming UNODC Global Report on Trafficking in Persons 2016 identifies a clear pattern linking undocumented migration to trafficking in persons.
Certain migration flows appear particularly vulnerable to human trafficking.
Nationals from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador represent about twenty per cent of the victims detected in the United States, while the legal migration flows from these countries represent about five per cent of the total.
Similar patterns are found in Western Europe, where citizens from South Eastern European countries comprise a large share of detected victims.
The UNODC report, which will be released later this year, further highlights the links between human trafficking and refugee flows from countries including Syria and Eritrea, and involving refugees from Myanmar and Bangladesh.
We clearly need to do much more to stop human traffickers and migrant smugglers, as part of coordinated and comprehensive responses to the refugee crisis and migration challenges we are facing around the world.
In order to do this, I urge governments to ratify and effectively implement the UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime and its Protocols on human trafficking and migrant smuggling.
By strengthening action under the Protocols, we can better protect vulnerable children, women and men.
The Convention and the Protocols also underpin the international cooperation needed to bring criminals to justice.
Too often and for too long, migrant smugglers and human traffickers have gone about their business with impunity.
But we know how to fight this fight.
The migrant smuggling investigation I referred to earlier is using the Convention's provisions on mutual legal assistance and extradition to pursue the alleged criminals across borders.
The Italian investigation is built on the instruments and expertise honed through many years of anti-mafia action, including tracking the financial proceeds of crime.
This shows that we can and we must make better use of the tools and frameworks that we already have in place, also in cases involving human trafficking.
I very much hope that Member States will take the opportunities presented by the UN Summit for Refugees and Migrants in September, and the Conference of the Parties to the UNTOC in October, to reinforce these efforts.
I also urge you to contribute to the UN Voluntary Trust Fund for Victims of Trafficking in Persons, which works across the globe to provide trafficking victims with shelter and vocational training and schooling, as well as access to health, psychosocial, legal and economic services.
Ladies and gentlemen,
The challenges presented by the unprecedented flows of people around the world are many. But as the Secretary-General has said, this is not a crisis of numbers, it is a crisis of solidarity.
This is true too of our efforts to protect people from human trafficking and other crimes.
Working together, we can give trafficking victims, as well as the many children, women and men vulnerable to abuse and exploitation, a much-needed voice and a helping hand.
You can count on UNODC to support you, as ever.
Thank you.
