Trafficking in women for the purpose of sexual exploitation is an increasing type of international organized crime[1]
generating high profits with low risk for traffickers.[2]
Thousands of women are being trafficked from developing to Western Europe and brought into conditions in which their basic human rights are violated.[3]
Only a minority of cases is reported and convictions of traffickers are rare.[4]
Public concern and international awareness have increased through the work of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), the United Nations,[5]
and the Council of Europe.[6]
The Justice and Home Affairs (JHA) Council of the European Union agreed to a set of recommendations in November 1993 to the Member States to counter trafficking[7]
and in addition to a number of resolutions, the European Parliament produced a unanimous report and resolution on trafficking in human beings in December 1995.[8]
For years, trafficking rings have thrived on the exploitation of women[9]
from developing countries.[10]
Recently countries of the former Soviet Union have become their latest targets.[11]
Where old Soviet economic systems have been disrupted or discarded, there has been economic contraction and hyperinflation, which has wiped out people's savings and security. Many of these countries are still writing their laws and developing their constitutions.[12]
In Ukraine, where women account for more than 60% of those who have lost their jobs in recent years, trafficking in women[13]
has become a goldmine.[14]
Lured by false promises, misled by false information on migration regulations, many women fall prey to unscrupulous traffickers, allowing their dream for a better life to be exploited. The United Nations estimates that 4 million people are trafficked each year,[15]
resulting in $7 billion in profits to criminal groups.[16]
Many countries have weak, unenforced or no laws against trafficking in human beings, often making it less risky and more profitable to criminal groups than drug or arms trafficking.[17]
With increased economic globalization,[18]
trafficking in women from poor to wealthier countries appears to be on the rise,[19]
accompanied by economic and public health ills. Trafficking networks may recruit and transport women legally or illegally for slavery-like work, including forced prostitution, sweatshop labor, and exploitative domestic servitude.[20]
Increased economic globalization and privatization[21]
has resulted in an increased feminization of poverty, forcing greater numbers of women worldwide to migrate in search of work.[22]
Seeking economic opportunities abroad, women turn to a variety of resources, including newspaper ads, acquaintances, marriage agencies, labor recruiters, and modeling agencies.[23]
They accept positions as nannies, maids, sex workers, dancers, factory workers, and hostesses.[24]
Many of these migrants end up as victims of illegal and unscrupulous trafficking networks. Trafficking, according to U.S. Senate Resolution 82 on Trafficking, "involves one or more forms of kidnapping, false imprisonment, rape, battering, forced labor, or slavery-like practices which violate fundamental human rights." [25]
Contemporary population movements are characterized by increasing pressures by individuals seeking, through migration, either to escape war, persecution, poverty, or human rights violations, or simply to find better economic opportunities.[26]
This is the irregular migration phenomenon of which trafficking is one part - albeit often a particularly abusive part, especially as it relates to women and children.[27]
In discussions on trafficking, particular attention has to be given to the question of the voluntariness [28]
of the migrants' movement, because it has legal consequences as we will see below. Trafficking in women has severely negative consequences for the women[29]
and societies involved. It is an issue that involves both gender and basic human rights abuses.[30]
The human rights of women include their right to have control over, and decide freely on matters relating to their sexuality, including sexual and reproductive health, free of coercion, discrimination and violence.[31]
Trafficking in women is violence against women. The 4th World Conference on Women[32]
addressed the physical, sexual, and psychological harm that this poses to its victims. It proposed several recommendations to governments of origin, transit and destination.
Studies on the health of women in the sex industry indicate that many women have serious health problems and are exposed to life-threatening risks. Female prostitutes suffer from infectious diseases, sexually transmitted diseases, injuries from violence, drug and alcohol addictions, depression and other mental health problems as a result of trauma.[33]
Women who are prostitutes or trafficked have serious health problems and cannot get out of prostitution whence they discover its evil horror.[34]
While female sexual slavery is permitted to exist on a monumental scale, we cannot assert that violence against women is a problem taken seriously beyond politically correct rhetoric.
Today, women are trafficked from South to North, from South to South and from East to West[35]
the flows are from poorer countries to countries where the standard of living for an average person is relatively higher. The fact that lesser developed countries' populations are used for trafficking supports the recognition of a right to development as a human right.[36]
Trafficking is linked with forced prostitution[37]
that follows false promises of well-paid jobs.[38]
However, not all women are trafficked for sexual exploitation. Many are traded for marriage, as domestic and construction workers, or as beggars. And too many of these women become victims of forced labor, in many cases suffering deprivation of freedom and appropriation of income, or being forced into slave-like[39]
practices.[40]
Selling desperate women into sexual bondage is an entrenched criminal enterprise in the robust global economy.[41]
The seemingly economic hopelessness in the Newly Independent States transitional economies opened what experts call the most lucrative market of all to Russian criminal gangs: Eastern European women with little to sustain them but their hopes.[42]
Pimps,[43]
law-enforcement officials and relief groups all agree that Ukrainian and Russian women are now the most valuable in the trade.[44]
Because their immigration is often illegal, and because some percentage of the women choose to work as prostitutes, statistics are difficult to assess. But the United Nations estimates that 4 million people throughout the world are trafficked each year.[45]
Trafficking in women and girls[46]
for the purpose of sexual exploitation[47]
is an open and flagrant human rights[48]
violation occurring around the world.[49]
When a woman or child is trafficked or sexually exploited, they are denied the most basic human rights, and in the worst case, they are denied their right to life. Prostitution and sexual exploitation have devastating health and quality of life effects on its victims.[50]
In Western Europe alone, the International Organisation for Migration[51]
estimates that around 500,000 women per year are trafficked from poorer regions in the world.[52]
Several factors lead women to look for working possibilities in other countries. In Eastern Europe, women have been the victims of the political and economic changes of the 90s with the dismantlement of the former Soviet Union social security structures and are today highly represented in unemployment statistics.[53]
In Europe, an increasing portion of the trafficked women comes from the former socialist countries.[54]
A growing amount of women who want to search for work abroad are deceived by traffickers into leaving their countries, believing that they will work as dancers or hostesses, or even as prostitutes, but instead end up living under slave-like conditions where their fundamental human rights[55]
are abused by the profiteer/pimp. For criminal groups, trafficking in women is a very profitable with revenues more than seven billion dollars annually from trafficking in human beings.[56]
The political and economic transition during the 90s has altered almost every aspect of life in Eastern Europe and the newly independent Baltic States. Along with the welcomed political liberty came vast economic problems with inflation, unemployment and lack of social programs to support the transition.[57]
Women proved to be major victims of the negative effects of the privatization, globalization, and related changes.[58]
With less access to the formal labor sector women are over represented in unemployment statistics throughout the former Soviet Union with greater feminization of poverty as a consequence.[59]
In the Russian Federation women represent between 70 and 95 percent of the unemployed.[60]
For many women, sexual services and domestic work are the only survival options available.[61]
With the closing of public childcare centers and reduction of pensions, women found themselves with the responsibility of being the support of the family with no possibilities for employment.
There are sound economic justifications for women of the newly independent Baltic States to seek employment outside their countries, for women who do have jobs, wages are low and sexual harassment at the workplace is common.[62]
Also, in the post socialist mixture of old traditions and new ideas, old ideals and new western influence, accepting the offers of a trafficker may be a fantasy for young women to break away from the authority of the old traditions, a way of trying to manifest freedom. Migration to Western Europe for work appears at first a promising option for women in Eastern Europe. However, there are very few ways of legally migrating for work in the European Union. Thus, the courageous women who have decided to try their luck and realize their dreams have to rely on middlemen and traffickers in order to migrate. The criminal groups exploit the fact that visas and working permits are required and can continue doing this because of government inaction, or even worse, government complicity in the form of corrupt officials.[63]
Ukraine, and to a lesser degree its Slavic neighbors Russia and Belarus, have replaced Thailand and the Philippines as the epicenter of the global business in trafficking women.[64]
The Ukrainian problem has been worsened by their ravaged economy, an underdeveloped and underfunded system of law enforcement, and criminal gangs that grow more brazen each year.[65]
Young European women are in demand, and Ukraine, a country of 51 million people, can supply. Sources far and wide, including the World Bank and the popular press present a clear story of chaos and economic dislocation in Russia, Ukraine, and the other newly independent states and their struggling, disastrous, transitional economies.[66]
Federal employment statistics in Ukraine indicate that more than two-thirds of the unemployed are women.[67]
Of those who have lost their jobs since the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, more than 80 percent are women.[68]
The average salary in Ukraine today is slightly less than $30 a month, but it is half that in the small towns that criminal gangs favor for recruiting women to work abroad.[69]
In that climate, looking for work in foreign countries has increasingly become a dream of survival. Money, newly found freedom after living in repressive countries, village life disintegrating throughout much of the former Soviet world, and women trying to explore and adapt all result in their taking this risk. "After the wall fell down, the Ukrainian people tried to live in the new circumstances," said Ms. Shved. "It was very hard, and it gets no easier. Girls now have few opportunities yet great freedom. They see 'Pretty Woman,' or movies and ads with the same point, that somebody who is rich will rescue them. The glory and ease of wealth is almost the basic point of the Western advertising that we see. Here the towns are dying. What jobs there are go to men. So they leave."[70]
The women answer ads from employment agencies promising to find them work in a foreign country, where Russian crime gangs play a central role.[71]
Often the ads are vague or blatantly untrue. Most of the thousands of Ukrainian women who go abroad each year are illegal immigrants who do not work in the sex business. Often they apply for a legal visa, to dance, or work in a bar, and then stay after it expires.[72]
Although trafficked women can be found almost anywhere, the destinations for most trafficked women are countries and cities where there are large sex industry centers and where prostitution is legalized or widely tolerated. Although some women may appear to voluntarily enter prostitution, this number could never meet the demand. If prostitution were a desirable, rewarding, lucrative job, traffickers would not have to deceive, coerce and enslave. Popular destinations for trafficked women are countries where prostitution is legal such as the Netherlands and Germany. According to Michael Platzer, Head of Operations for the United Nation's Center for International Crime Prevention, "The laws help the gangsters. Prostitution is semi-legal in many places and that makes enforcement tricky. In most cases punishment is very light."[73]
Many go to Turkey and Germany, where Russian crime groups are particularly powerful. Officials in Italy estimate that at least 30,000 Ukrainian women are employed illegally there now.[74]
Most are domestic workers, but a growing number are prostitutes, some of them having been promised work as domestics only to find out their jobs were prostitution, others knew it would be prostitution, but had no idea what they were getting into and then cannot get out.[75]
Many non-government organizations (NGOs) view trafficking in women as an important issue.[76]
There is disagreement on whether prostitution is violence against women,[77]
on how to handle trafficking and prostitution and the key conflict lies in differing viewpoints on prostitution.[78]
Some organizations want to treat trafficking and prostitution as aspects of the same problem and consequently fight both at the same time. This causes problems for organizations wanting to stop trafficking in women but to legalize prostitution.[79]
Discussions are underway and many NGOs try to exclude prostitution from the discussion of trafficking in order to obtain some sort of consensus. However, when examining the nature of prostitution deeply, its health effects, its dynamics, it is clear that notions of legalizing prostitution are incompatible with maintaining the dignity of a human being. Prostitution and trafficking are not victimless crimes, or just another form of work, as pimps and apologists for the sex industry would have us believe. Even when women voluntarily enter into these situations, in hope of making money or finding a better life, the dynamics of the brutal, often illegal sex industry, quickly leave the women with few other options and powerless to leave.[80]
Observers of the evolution of the United Nations World Conferences on Women would attest that building a consensus for resolutions has not come easily at many of these forums.[81]
Since the trafficking of women for purposes of sexual exploitation is not a new phenomenon and international laws were drafted and ratified in the earlier half of this century. In 1949, the United Nations General Assembly passed the Convention for the Suppression of Traffic in Persons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others. The convention states that "prostitution and the accompanying evil of the traffic in persons for the purpose of prostitution are incompatible with the dignity and worth of the human person and endanger the welfare of the individual, the family and the community."[82]
Ukraine is a signatory of the 1949 Convention (1954), along with Latvia (1992), Belarus (1956), and the Russian Federation (1954). The 1949 Convention states that consent of the trafficked person is irrelevant to the prosecution of the exploiter. The 1949 Convention was not widely ratified and did not create a monitoring body, so there has been no ongoing evaluation of its implementation or effectiveness. In 1998 at the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, the World Federation of the Ukrainian Women's Organizations and World Movement of Mothers called for governments to work toward suppressing the trafficking of women and girls and implementing the 1949 Convention. Currently, the 1949 Convention is under strong attack by those who favor legalized prostitution and even "consensual trafficking." The trend toward legalization of the sex industry and narrower definitions of trafficking which require proof of coercion or force will make the conviction of traffickers very difficult and will greatly benefit transnational criminal networks. Another approach to ending trafficking is to end the demand for women to be used in prostitution. In 1998, Sweden passed a law on violence against women that created a new offense: "gross violation of a woman's integrity." Prostitution was included as a type of violence against women. As of January 1, 1999, the "purchase of sexual services" was prohibited, punishable by fines and/or imprisonment up to six months.[83]
The Swedish government was clear that this new offense marked Sweden's attitude toward prostitution as an "undesirable social phenomenon" and an act of violence against women. The new offense of gross violation of a woman's integrity and the prohibition on purchase of sexual services aims to eliminate acts of violence that stand in the way of equality for women. Sweden's approach recognizes the harm done to women under conditions of sexual exploitation. Their approach starts from the premise that women have the right to dignity, integrity and equality. Legalization of prostitution is sometimes thought to be a solution to trafficking in women, but evidence seems to show that legalized sex industries actually result in increased trafficking to meet the demand for women to be used in the legal sex industries. Increased activity of organized crime networks also accompanies increases in trafficking.[84]
The Internet has become the latest place for promoting the global trafficking and sexual exploitation of women.[85]
The information superhighway is used to actively engage in the buying and selling of women and children. Catalogs of mail order brides, commercial sex tours, video-conferencing bringing live strip shows to the Internet: it is all there, and worse.[86]
Because there is still scant regulation of the Internet, the traffickers and promoters of sexual exploitation have virtual carte blanche.[87]
Currently, there are details on finding and buying prostitutes available for 97 European cities.[88]
A few countries in Europe[89]
and the United States[90]
have now made it possible to press charges against men for their sexual abuse of children while in other countries. Every country should have such a law, and enforce it.[91]
In addition, it should be illegal to use the Internet to post information on the finding and sexually exploiting women and children.[92]
As we all know the new technologies of the Internet have leapt over national borders and lawmakers are scrambling to catch-up.[93]
Internet users have adopted and defend an unbridled libertarianism. Any kind of regulation or restriction is met with vigorous protest. Even limited restrictions on the transmission of child pornography are greeted with cries of restriction of freedom of speech. If expressions of concern or condemnation of forms of sexual exploitation of women and children on the Internet are minimized by claims of the need for internet freedom and free speech,[94]
it is imperative that we must define sexual exploitation as human rights violations and crimes against women,[95]
which we will not allow in our communities or on the Internet.[96]
On a trip to Ukraine late in 1997 Hillary Rodham Clinton[97] spoke out about the new slave trade that has developed so rapidly there.[98]
The United States and the European Union have worked together to educate young women[99]
about the dangers of working abroad. Other initiatives, such as of deportation for prisoners, victims' shelters and counseling, have also been discussed.[100]
Yet the problem is complex, and involves matters such as countries' still legalizing prostitution,[101]
faulty concepts behind the victims voluntariness and choice in participating[102]
and an entrenched, criminal network with more money and power than some governments.
United States Senate bill number S.600 introduced in the U.S. Senate called the "International Trafficking of Women and Children Victim Protection Act"[103]
This Act and its companion House Bill HR. 1238[104]
are aimed[105]
at providing temporary asylum for immigrant victims and stopping federal assistance to the foreign governments that are directly involved in the international sex trafficking trade.[106]
On March 11, 1999, U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone introduced in the U.S. Senate Bill S.600[107]
for the purpose of condemning and combating international trafficking in women and children and protecting victims' rights. This Bill, co-sponsored by Senators Dianne Feinstein, Barbara Boxer and Patty Murray, if enacted, would begin to tackle this hideous form of slavery.
But solutions are not simple.[108]
Criminal gangs risk little by ferrying women out of the country; indeed, many of the women go voluntarily. Laws are vague,[109]
cooperation between countries rare[110]
and punishment of traffickers almost nonexistent.[111]
International organizations' mainstreaming[112]
of gender[113]
and attempting to raise the status of women are occurring, but the problem is far more complex, deep, insidious, corrupt, and multifaceted,[114]
involving significant criminal enforcement challenges and the darkest realms of human nature.
Broadening the concept of asylum in the United States would be helpful in alleviating part of this tragic problem.[115]
Asylum is provided for in the modern law of civilized nations to protect victims of selected human rights violations occurring globally.[116]
The typical human rights victim is portrayed in both legal and human rights literature as a male dissident, tortured or imprisoned by the State. The statistics, however, prove most of the world's asylee population is female.[117]
Frequently, officials of the government are directly responsible for such acts of violence.[118]
Other times, the government of a State knowingly tolerates or approves of a social pattern of widespread violence against women, making the government indirectly responsible for the violence.[119]
Some women may end up as victims of trafficking and exploitation through officially legal routes.[120]
In other instances, women knowingly agree to migrate for work in the sex industry, but then are coerced into debt bondage where they are forced to repay their trafficker and/or employer for transportation and other "fees."[121]
Further, because these women may have entered the U.S. or other countries illegally and are often working in an illegal industry, they are afraid to turn to local authorities for help and are unable to file civil suits against their abusers or have access to other protections provided by labor laws. In such cases, the criminalization of prostitution where the victim prostitute is prosecuted "adds to the burden of women who are already victims," noted Mary Robinson, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.[122]
Since January 1999, 102 countries have been meeting at the United Nations in Vienna to draft a new Convention against Transnational Organized Crime.[123]
The purpose of the Convention is to define areas of law enforcement cooperation, legal procedures and other measures between States relating to all forms of transnational crime. Three "Additional Protocols" are also being drafted that address Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children; Smuggling of Migrants by Land, Air and Sea; and Illicit Manufacturing of and Trafficking in Firearms, Their Parts and Components and Ammunition. There have been three ad hoc sessions during 1999 where the Protocol on the Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children has been discussed. In the beginning sessions, the texts of the main Convention and the Trafficking in Persons Protocol reflected the history and the principles of past human rights instruments,[124]
including the 1949 Convention on the Suppression of the Trafficking in Persons and the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others, CEDAW Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women and the Convention on the Rights of the Child. At this point in the drafting, all of these human rights convention references have been deleted from the text.[125]
The core and most contentious part of the Trafficking in Persons Protocol is the definition of trafficking itself. In the present version of Article 2 of the Draft Protocol on the Trafficking in Persons, there are two competing definitions of trafficking.[126]
In general, the pro-sex work lobby and some governmental delegations are trying to edit the terms "trafficking for prostitution" and "sexual exploitation" from the entire text. With the exception of the definition of trafficking being debated in Article 2, Option 2, the word "prostitution" is not mentioned in any other article of the Trafficking in Persons Protocol. The Coalition Against Trafficking in Women and its partner organizations have responded that since most trafficking is for sexual exploitation, a trafficking Convention should name and specify the major purpose for which trafficking occurs.[127]
Ineffective privatization, the lack of law enforcement, lack of rule of law[128]
the professionalization of organized crime, and the absence of a legal culture have allowed organized crime to flourish from trafficking. The Russian mafiya is one of the premier actors. Recruiting methods and the trafficking problem and its relation to Russian crime gangs were exposed in a two-year study by the Washington-based non-profit group Global Survival Network (GSN).[129]
The GSN network, after undercover interviews with gangsters, pimps and corrupt officials,[130]
found that local police forces, often those best able to prevent trafficking, are least interested in helping.[131]
That is not the view at Ukraine's parliament, which has passed new laws[132]
to protect young women.[133]
In addition to a lack of relevant property and criminal law,[134]
the Newly Independent States also lack relevant contract law.[135]
The longer a government waits to take action against organized crime the harder the mafiya will be to dislodge. If the mafiya does become so entrenched in the former Soviet Union that the local governments cannot remove it, then it poses not only a domestic threat but also an international threat.[136]
A major threat is that the mafiya is in charge of nuclear weapons.[137]
If governments cannot control the mafiya, how do we expect trafficked women to stand up against them? [138]
The Russian economy has been a disaster story of corruption.[139]
Organized crime controls Russian politics, economics, and society.[140]
In Russia today, there are over 5,000 gangs, 3,000 hardened criminals, 300 mob bosses, and 150 illegal organizations with international connections. Approximately 40,000 Russian business and industrial enterprises are controlled by organized crime. Their combined output is higher than the gross national product of many members of the United Nations. The Russian mafiya is estimated to turn over in excess of $10 billion a year. More Russians died of criminal violence in 1993 than were killed during nine years of war in Afghanistan.[141]
In 1994, criminals took 118 people hostage in Moscow alone. Ten Western businessmen were kidnapped for ransom in 1995, and one of them murdered.[142]
The situation in the other Newly Independent States of the former Soviet Union is worse, with criminal gangs even controlling the value of some national currencies.[143]
Investigations by the Global Survival Network documented the involvement of government officials in the trafficking of women from Russia.[144]
Trafficking in women has arguably the highest profit margin and lowest risk of almost any type of illegal activity. According to Michael Platzer, United Nations Center for International Crime Prevention, "There's a lot of talk about drugs, but it's the white slave trade that earns the biggest money for criminal groups in Eastern Europe." Corruption of officials through bribes and even collaboration of officials in criminal networks enables traffickers to operate in communities and states. Officials in key positions and at many levels use their authority to provide protection to criminal activities. During a two-year investigation of trafficking in women from Russia, the Global Survival Network found evidence of government collaboration in the Interior Ministry, the Federal Security Service and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. As the influence of criminal networks deepens, the corruption goes beyond an act of occasionally ignoring illegal activity to providing protection by blocking legislation that would hinder the activities of the groups. As law enforcement personnel and government officials become more corrupt and members of the crime groups gain more influence, the line between the state and the criminal networks starts to blur. This merging of criminal networks and the government seems to have occurred in many of the states that have emerged from the Soviet Union. Under these circumstances it is difficult to intervene in the succession of corruption, collaboration, crime and profit.
Trafficking in women as a shadow economy does not bring financial prosperity to local communities. The women often end up with nothing, or any money they earn comes at great cost to their health, emotional well being and standing in the community. The money made by the criminal networks does not stay in poor communities or countries, but is laundered through bank accounts of criminal bosses in financial centers, such US, Western European countries or in off-shore accounts. Centered in Moscow and the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, the networks trafficking women run east to Japan and Thailand, where thousands of young Slavic women now work against their will as prostitutes, and west to the Adriatic Coast and beyond. Russian crime gangs based in Moscow control the routes.[145]
Israel is a fairly typical destination. Prostitution is not illegal there, and with 250,000 foreign male workers, most of whom are single or here without their wives, the demand is great. Police officials estimate that there are 25,000 paid sexual transactions every day.[146]
The efficient, brutal routine endured by trafficked women in dozens of countries, rarely varies. Women are held in apartments, bars and makeshift brothels; there they service, by their own count, as many as 15 clients a day; often they sleep in shifts, four to a bed.[147]
Few ever testify against their traffickers. Those who do risk death. In 1998 in Istanbul, Turkey, according to Ukrainian police investigators, two women were thrown to their deaths from a balcony while six of their Russian friends watched. In Serbia, in 1998, said a young Ukrainian woman who escaped in October, a woman who refused to work as a prostitute was beheaded in public.[148]
As Senator Sam Nunn has argued, "crime, and particularly organized crime, has become one of the most dangerous forces to arise from the collapse of the Soviet system."[149]
In the Newly Independent States of the former Soviet Union, the mafiya has undermined economic reform, aggravated the public's dissatisfaction with their current regimes, and subverted government decisions. Nevertheless, in spite of all the negative effects associated with the presence of the mafiya in these transitional states, several academics and economists, like Yegor Gaidar, Yeltsin's first deputy Prime Minister, maintain that corruption in a market economy is not unprecedented.[150]
Despite the fact that the presence of the mafiya in a transitional economy may have certain benefits, and that opportunistic American and other government sponsored advisors participated in the corruption,[151]
the reform that would render the mafiya obsolete might never occur, if a transitional government does not take immediate action against the mafiya.
Crime and its impact on the development of democracy is the primary concern of many Russian politicians. In April 1994, another Russian Member of Parliament was gunned down in front of his home on the outskirts of Moscow in a gang-style shooting.[152]
In commenting on this incident, members of the Duma have expressed their displeasure with having to serve alongside other members of the Duma who are connected, or believed to be connected, to organized crime groups. In fact, Mafiya leaders actually encourage criminals to seek seats in the Duma because of the broad immunity conferred on those elected to the Russian parliament, and it is a well-known fact that a number of individuals have run for office solely to avoid prison sentences.[153]
Law enforcement sources report a dramatic increase in this problem over the last two years in the New Jersey and New York area.[154]
The Baltic trafficked women in the United States are recruited, managed and transported by Russian Organized Crime (ROC) syndicates into the United States, as in other countries, and used primarily as sex slaves, go-go dancers, and indentured household workers. The Russian mafiya is a very powerful, grave, international threat. Some sources argue it has had the support of international organizations and the United States Agency for International Development contractor Harvard Institute for International Development as a necessary evil in the privatization efforts of newly independent Russia.[155]
The United Nations has estimated that 4 million people (both men and women) are trafficked annually, resulting in profits to criminal groups of up to $7 billion.[156]
In Russia, a country already suffering from political and economic disaster, it is reported that an estimated 80 percent of the private enterprises and commercial banks are forced to pay a tribute of 10 to 25 percent of their profits to organized crime. They use the banks to launder money and avoid paying taxes desperately needed by the government to pay salaries and debts.[157]
All too often we hear of government and military personnel in Russia not being paid for months.[158]
To further cripple the economy, these crime groups dominate economic sectors, such as petroleum distribution, pharmaceuticals and consumer products distribution.
Law enforcement agencies throughout the United States are now taking the activities of ROC seriously. ROC is spreading rapidly to states like California, Colorado, Illinois, and Florida. One of the reasons for this rapid spread is because ROC in the New York / New Jersey area is forced to pay a "tax" to the La Cosa Nostra (LCN) crime syndicate on the profits they make on illegal activities.[159]
There are over 12,000 crime groups in Russia - triple what it was in 1992 - with no sign of slowing down. These groups are getting stronger and stronger and using Russia as the base for their global activities. Currently, there are about 30 ROC syndicates operating in the United States. Many of these ROC groups in the United States continue to have strong ties to organized crime groups in Russia and Ukraine. There was one individual who was sent from Russia "to control all Russian organized crime in the United States and Canada." He is Vyacheslav Ivankov, who is currently serving a 9-year federal prison sentence in New York for extorting $3.5million from two Russian businessmen.[160]
Just recently, billions of dollars have been channeled through the Bank of New York in the last year.[161]
This is believed to be the largest money laundering operation ever uncovered in the United States.[162]
ROC's sophistication poses grave challenges to legislative and law enforcement authorities, and their violent nature has rendered their victims extremely vulnerable. Trafficking in women and children is a global human rights issue that requires a comprehensive response from government and non-government organizations around the world. These organizations have to work on a parallel level to develop anti-trafficking programs. The victims, instead of support, face "prosecution or shocking indifference," says Caldwell of the Global Survival Network.[163]
Until now, the trafficking in Russian women has taken a back seat to U.S. law enforcement's efforts to fight such Russian mafiya activities as extortion, medical insurance fraud, and scams to evade gasoline excise taxes. But several important cases have recently demonstrated the possible connection between the trafficking in women and other forms of racketeering, according to Justice Department sources.[164]
Ukrainian-American police management consultant, Walter Zalisko, recommends that United States policy should do more for trafficking victims.[165]
The next session of the UN Transnational Crimes Commission is to discuss and debate the Trafficking in Persons Protocol during the week of February 28-March 3, 2000. There is to be an "informal meeting" on the Trafficking in Persons Protocol from January 17-28 from which NGOs have been excluded. Other sessions at which the Trafficking in Persons Protocol is to be discussed during the week of June 12-16 and during the week of July 24-28 2000. There will also be a four week session in October, 2000, with all these sessions taking place at the United Nations in Vienna. The United States is pushing for this Convention and its Protocols to be finished quickly by the end of the year 2000. Many NGOs and governments want to do away with the 1949 Convention arguing that it is "ineffective, regressive, outmoded and moralistic." Barring that, they want to supersede it with this new Convention against Transnational Organized Crime and the Trafficking in Persons Protocol.
Ever since the UN Declaration on Violence against Women and the Platform of Action[166]
emerging from the 4th World Women's Conference in Beijing, "forced prostitution" has been the language advocated in UN circles. The sex industry can only benefit from this terminology since it helps shield pimps and profiteers from prosecution and goes a long way toward making pimping legitimate.
The United Nations has recognized trafficking as a form of slavery and violence against women. It has also been condemned by numerous international human rights documents.[167]
Moreover, because trafficking is a problem that transcends national borders, it demands a trans-national response. Collaborative relationships must be formed between the "sending countries" of the former Eastern Bloc, Asia, Africa and Latin America, and "receiving countries" in the wealthier nations of North America and Western Europe. What governments have failed to understand, or have chosen to ignore, is that trafficking is a contravention of basic human rights that has been condemned by an array of international conventions, treaties, and other instruments. Furthermore, practices routinely used by traffickers, such as debt bondage, threats, intimidation, and withholding of wages are illegal under national laws. A trafficked person must be treated not as a criminal but as a fully empowered human being. If each government focused on these human rights abuses when they are inflicted on foreign women residing within their national borders, they would be addressing fundamental human rights violations associated with trafficking operations. A broader, more consistent approach to stopping the traffic in women is clearly needed. State action in and of itself is only part of the solution, It is therefore important that any attempt to curb trafficking addresses not only law enforcement and immigration authorities, but the need to educate women worldwide.
Trafficking of women is symptomatic of the globalized world economic order and socio-political climate polarizations, corruption, and tensions. The global landscape continues to be defined by a constellation of dependent relationships, and intractable forces of change continue to create violations and inequities. The credibility of the rule of law appears ineffective to alleviate oppressions and address criminal networks around the globe. Alongside the consolidation of wealth and power in the hands of a few non-governmental authorities, sprout human rights campaigns and documents aspiring to the protection of human dignity. Although there is a steadily evolving global culture of adherence to human rights standards, breaches and abuses remain flagrant and deplorable. An obvious constraint on the international human rights regime lies in the nature of those who govern, and the nature of conciliatory power. Although common interests and the adverse repercussions of flagrant abuse in the international arena generally motivate sovereign States to fulfill their treaty obligations in good faith, systematic reliance on the political will and cooperation of the States is clearly insufficient. Governments have a long history of disparity between the theory and practice of their pronouncements and ideals. So do individuals. The complexities of the trafficking issue underscores the fact that there is as much a need to develop effective implementation mechanisms for the protection of human rights as there is to proclaim those rights. While legal rights do exert some influence, they are essentially dependent variables. Even when accompanied by stiff mechanisms that monitor reception and implementation, they have a limited capacity to compel any particular course of action. Rights impose correlative duties on others to refrain from acting against the interests of the persons holding the rights. Hence, human rights are of practical significance only if corresponding legal obligations are established. By the same token, unless a duty can be effectively enforced, it is merely a voluntary obligation subject to the whim of the addressee. Given the decentralized character of the world arena and the complexity of most of the issues it handles, the ideals and objectives of socio-legal reform require implementation measures that are both more aggressive and independent from existing power structures.
Global problems are those that by their very nature transcend the capacity of the nation-state to deal with them effectively as an independent entity. For instance, global threats to the environment; massive, persistent gross violation of human rights; and the protection and use of natural resources in the global commons are problems that are far beyond the capabilities of even the strongest nation-states.[168]
The U.N. may have a constructive role to play as a forum for the determination of the public interest of the globalizing international community, as the main U.N. organs have directly contributed to promoting the international "public interest", a notion well-known in domestic public law.[169]
The U.N.'s role in promoting participation of non-state Actors in international lawmaking, dispute resolution, and forming a network of global governance, can also be directed to solving trafficking and corruption problems. There is a need to develop a global legal framework in order to curb the power and influence of such global actors as corrupt governments, multinational corporations (MNCs) and powerful interest groups. The U.N.-initiated code of conduct for MNCs is an early example for what is advocated as the U.N.'s legislative role in dealing with certain global problems.[170]
Finally, The role of the U.N. in promoting the progressive development of interactions in the field of global concerns can also be applied to trafficking: promoting the understanding of public interest norms such as erga omnes and/or jus cogens norms.[171]
If humankind is to survive, the global challenges such as effective global environmental protection, prevention of gross violations of human rights such as trafficking in women and children, and starvation, torture, must be addressed. "The ability of individual States, particularly the larger ones, to choose freely to opt out of a global governance for survival, cannot be viewed as compatible with the notion of a legal order. Given the record of the U.N. General Assembly in promoting the notion of international public interest as a legitimizing factor in the pursuance of vital interests of the international community, it could also play an important role in reconsidering and reshaping the very basis of the international legal order itself and making it fit to be the normative framework, not only of a system of self-interested States, but of that of an emerging global society."[172]
They can try these traffickers ala Pinochet[173]
and view trafficking as crimes against peace and against humanity.[174]
Although the clandestine and criminal nature hides the actual incidence of trafficking, it is perceived to be a growing problem since its root causes, (poverty, scarce resources, lack of opportunities for and low status of women, and political and economic instability, as well as the growth of networks of trans-border organized crime), continue to be global factors. Strategies to address these root factors should be facilitated and supported by the United Nations and its Member States, and at the same time measures should be strengthened to discourage traffickers, protect those who are vulnerable to trafficking, offer legal, physical and psychological protection and empowerment to victims of trafficking, and address the futures of women and children who have been victims of trafficking. States should accord the highest priority to crime prevention and law enforcement policies in relation to this issue. They should ensure that specific offences related to trafficking exist and are widely and clearly defined, and that the penalties for these offences adequately reflect their gravity. International, regional, sub-regional and bilateral intergovernmental agreements should be formulated and enforced in order to ensure and facilitate the prosecution of offenders, irrespective of location. States should introduce legislation incorporating extra-territorial jurisdiction to facilitate the prosecution of traffickers, as well as clear extradition procedures for trafficking-related offences. Measures should also be introduced to allow confiscation of the criminal revenue of trafficking networks. Judicial cooperation and information sharing between Member States should be encouraged and facilitated.
Measures to encourage victims of trafficking to identify traffickers and act as witnesses in criminal prosecutions should also be explored. These might include restrictions on deportation where victims are prepared to act as witnesses, and witness protection measures. Victims of trafficking should have access to legal, psychological and medical assistance. Victims of trafficking should be awarded compensation through criminal compensation schemes, which could be financed through the confiscated criminal revenue of traffickers. Intergovernmental agreements to guarantee the voluntary and safe return of women and ensure that protection and support is provided to trafficked women awaiting repatriation proceedings should be elaborated. The human rights of victims should be assured and steps should be taken to ensure they are not criminalized or imprisoned. Bilateral agreements obliging cooperation between local immigration officials and consulates to assist trafficked women should be developed and publicized. Measures to guarantee the voluntary and safe return of trafficked women should be put in place, and any barriers for trafficked women to return to their countries, with or without passports or identification documents, should be eliminated. Broad efforts to strengthen training and public awareness of civil servants dealing with migration, particularly those at embassies and consulates and those in charge of the delivery of visas, should be increased, and Governments should train law enforcement officials at all levels with respect to trafficking, violence against women and recognition of trafficking situations, including identification of front companies and groups. Broad-based ongoing educational and awareness-raising campaigns, including the media, to combat domestic and international trafficking should be introduced nationally, regionally, regionally and internationally. Vulnerable groups should be particularly targeted and community-based strategies employed. Relevant cases and evidence should be collected, shared, and the modus operandi of traffickers should be encouraged so as to provide a concrete basis for legal and policy change.
By all means, strategies aimed at trafficking should focus on trafficking and the criminal nature of this activity and those involved in this conduct, rather than on the activity of the victims of trafficking, whose human rights should be assured.
