Young Tunisian girls working for well-off families in Tunis or coastal cities often experience freedom restrictions and abuses. Also, abroad, Tunisian women have been promised well-paid jobs, ending up deceived and forced to work in prostitution. Tunisia has seen an increase of both national and foreign migrants departing from its shores in the hope of reaching Europe. 

To help judges identify and better understand cases of human trafficking and smuggling of migrants, UNODC supported the development of the above Manual. A first version was drafted by three Tunisian judges during a UNODC-supported Training of Trainers' program in 2015. After the adoption of the 2016 law aligning Tunisian legislation with international standards, the manual was revised by the same local experts. Subsequently, in the past two years, local experts have trained more than 400 judges and law enforcement agents on the new legislation with UNODC support. 

The Manual for Judges used in the training focuses on the Tunisian law and the international norms and standards in the field of trafficking in persons and migrants smuggling including all the relevant legal frameworks in the field of human trafficking and migrants smuggling as well as relevant literature and existing cases.

The President of the National Committee on Trafficking in Persons welcomed the Manual as "an essential tool for magistrates to deal with the complexity of human trafficking cases".

This training was organized thanks to the generous support provided by the United Kingdom ( UK-CSSF).