The international community has defined trafficking in persons in the UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress, and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children as follows:
• Trafficking in persons shall mean the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation.
• Exploitation shall include, at a minimum, the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labor or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs.
• The consent of a victim of trafficking in persons to the intended exploitation set forth in subpara A. of this article shall be irrelevant where any of the means set forth in subpara A. have been used.
• The recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring or receipt of a child for the purpose of exploitation shall be considered trafficking in persons even if it does not involve any of the means set forth in subpara A. “Child” shall mean any person under eighteen years of age.
There is often confusion between people smuggling and people trafficking, which is serious because the responses, at both policy and operational level, should be very different. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime, has produced a useful paper entitled Distinguishing between Human Trafficking and People Smuggling.
