Director-General/Executive Director
Thank you, Professor Thompson, and my thanks to Nuffield College for inviting me to speak here today.
I am grateful and pleased to have Ms. May join us at this event, alongside other distinguished guests, college faculty, students, alumni, and friends.
Being invited to speak at Oxford University is a great honour, and I was especially pleased to receive the invitation from Nuffield College, which brings leading social scientists together and bridges the academic and public spheres to help address some of the biggest problems facing our world today.
This is why I felt that it is a perfect place to have a focused and frank dialogue, like the one I hope we will have today.
Human trafficking, the topic of our discussion today, is a horrific crime that scars, degrades, and dehumanizes its victims.
Slavery has existed for a very long time, but human trafficking is linked to the social and economic realities of today.
It exists everywhere, but manifests itself differently in different contexts.
And it involves patterns of exploitation that are changing with our times.
Before we delve into the topic, I want to give you a very brief introduction to the entity that I lead, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, or UNODC, so that you have a better understanding of the perspective I bring.
UNODC is the United Nations entity mandated with addressing the challenges of drugs, organized crime, corruption, and terrorism.
We help governments implement international treaties, monitor global developments, and design effective laws, policies, and interventions.
We are present in 150 countries, where we train practitioners in justice, health, law enforcement, and other fields.
Among our most important areas of work, and one that might be of particular interest to you, is research.
Research is a core pillar of our work, and a foundation for the evidence-based policies we promote.
We produce reports and publications on a vast range of topics within our mandate, from drug markets to environmental crimes to homicide, femicide and more. And we collect data from across countries to gain a global understanding of trends, flows, and linkages.
Some of our flagship research is in fact reflected in our Global Report on Trafficking in Persons, and the 2024 edition, launched in December, will serve as the basis for most of the data I will be citing today.
So, why are we focusing today’s discussion on human trafficking and the exploitation it involves?
I had many conversations with my colleagues and with Professor Thompson at Nuffield College, trying to nail down the topic for today’s talk and narrow down its focus.
After all, today’s criminal landscape is full of urgent challenges to discuss.
In the end, I chose to speak to you on this topic because human trafficking intersects with other urgent challenges we face, yet it is garnering less attention than most.
Different forms of organized crime, from drug trafficking to online scams to illegal logging and mining, involve the exploitation and abuse of trafficking victims.
Yet human trafficking today is not happening in the dark corners of some shadowy underworld.
It is happening in our economies and industries, in our communities and neighbourhoods, on the platforms we use to connect with each other online.
It is happening across the globe, to people of diverse backgrounds and circumstances, especially the poor and the marginalized.
And it is happening in a world rife with vulnerabilities.
Armed conflict is spreading on a scale unseen since the end of the Second World War, economic shocks have sent inequality soaring, and the planet exceeded the 1.5-degree climate target set in the Paris Agreement last year.
A record number of over 110 million people are displaced worldwide.
Against this backdrop, the magnitude of human trafficking is difficult to quantify.
Our findings show that there were more than 200,000 victims of human trafficking identified globally between 2020 and 2023.
This is the official data communicated by countries, and it only covers the victims they have managed to reach.
There have been different estimates of trafficking and exploitation victims, some of them in the millions, but the frightening truth is that we just don’t know.
And part of the problem is that misunderstandings and stereotypes surround this form of crime.
When I first became Executive Director of UNODC, I was familiar with most of the topics we deal with. I had served as a minister in my home country Egypt, and I had worked for UNDP.
I had seen the harms and consequences of organized crime, illicit drugs and terrorism up close.
But human trafficking was one topic where our work kept educating me and shocking me, from the horrors faced by victims to the different kinds of people who ended up exploited to the complicated dynamics of exploitative relationships.
It has never been more important to dispel the myths surrounding human trafficking and exploitation and promote a more nuanced view.
And it has never been clearer that greater impact is within reach, if we are willing to look at some of the more challenging issues underpinning human trafficking.
To start off, I want to lay the groundwork for this discussion: What constitutes human trafficking?
I am sure that many of you have heard and read different terms and concepts in this regard.
The term “modern slavery”, for example, is commonly used here in the UK, and overlaps significantly with the concept of human trafficking.
Our approach at the UN and at UNODC is guided by the UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime and its Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children.
The Protocol establishes three key elements to identify this crime: the act, the means, and the purpose. I want to briefly explain what this means in practice, starting at the end.
The purpose of human trafficking is exploitation.
The Protocol lists specific forms of exploitation as key examples, including sexual exploitation, and forced labour, but it leaves the door open for others.
The act refers to recruiting, moving or receiving people, in order to carry out this exploitation.
And the means refers to the “how”: getting people to comply by coercing them, abducting them, deceiving them, or abusing a situation of power over them.
This manifests in diverse and horrific ways: people being forced into the sex trade under threat of violence, people being promised fake jobs before being made to work in captivity, people working away in the most inhumane conditions to pay off debts, and much more.
The Protocol also made clear that human trafficking can happen within and across national borders.
The Trafficking Protocol is one of the most ratified international legal instruments against serious exploitation, with 182 member countries.
Since it entered into force in 2003, we have seen important progress. The number of countries that have specific legislation criminalizing human trafficking in all its aspects has almost doubled: from 99 in 2009 to more than 180 in 2024.
Victim protection and assistance have come forward by leaps and bounds, with the provisions of the Protocol providing a new standard.
National mechanisms to identify victims and refer them for help have become more common.
Under-reported forms of exploitation are becoming more understood and reported.
And there seems to be a growing understanding that coercion is a layered concept.
Yet we must be honest and clear: none of these important developments have come close to ending human trafficking.
To understand the persistence of this criminal enterprise, we have to examine its nature in the modern context.
And we can start by looking at the profiles of the victims themselves.
Children are becoming an ever-bigger presence in our charts and graphs. In 2022, 38 per cent of identified victims worldwide were minors, almost a third more than three years earlier.
In Africa, they account for the majority.
Women and girls continue to represent the largest share of identified victims, accounting for 61 per cent of the total in 2022, mostly for sexual exploitation.
But men and boys are not far behind at 39 per cent. In 2009, they only represented 24 per cent.
Forced labour now accounts for the biggest share of identified human trafficking victims at 42 per cent. It has overtaken sexual exploitation for the first time in our reporting.
And forced criminality is swiftly growing as a detected form of trafficking, accounting for around 8 per cent of the total today, compared to less than 1 per cent only ten years earlier.
The range of victims being exploited is expanding, and this is partly because our understanding of this crime is growing. But it also suggests a broadening landscape of vulnerabilities and exploitation models.
The profile of the perpetrators is equally important, and it reveals that human trafficking today is an organized and lucrative business.
Am analysis of court cases by UNODC showed that organized criminal groups were responsible for 74 per cent of the trafficking cases we studied.
And last year, a report by the International Labour Organization estimated that the annual profits accrued from forced labour and sexual exploitation alone amount to 236 billion dollars.
This estimate does not account for many other forms of trafficking, and there are many cases where the returns of exploitation are mixed in with legal revenues.
Criminal groups have managed to create chains of exploitation that are efficient, persistent, and pervasive.
Which brings us back to the question: how is it that human trafficking persists and thrives?
There are many, many factors that feed into this equation.
For today, I want to focus on three important characteristics that have allowed human trafficking and associated exploitation to adapt and to persevere.
Firstly, human trafficking is co-opting digital technologies, and they have had a transformative impact on the way it operates.
The internet and digital tools have given traffickers far more reach to lure and recruit victims, and online recruitment has now become the norm, using things like dating apps and online advertisements.
But criminal innovation has also gone far beyond.
Trafficking for sexual exploitation is a prominent example.
Online spaces are now places where traffickers recruit, groom, control, and exploit victims, including by producing content like webcam shows and disseminating child sexual abuse material.
It is a setting with far more anonymity for perpetrators and often unrestricted access to potential victims.
And it has fundamentally changed some of the dynamics: it is now possible for a victim in one part of the world to be exploited by multiple people in other parts of the world, repeatedly and simultaneously, with just a tap on a screen.
And materials depicting exploitation can now be disseminated and replicated at massive reach and speed.
Digital technologies are also giving rise to new criminal industries that operate on exploitation.
Cyber-enabled fraud and scam operations are spreading in Southeast Asia, where skilled young professionals are trafficked into Special Economic Zones by powerful criminal cartels.
These victims are then forced to conduct sophisticated scams using technology, persuading people to pour their money into sham investments or romances or impersonating police personnel collecting fines.
New strains of tech-enabled trafficking and exploitation bring new challenges.
Victims and perpetrators are scattered across the globe, making it even harder to collect evidence and pursue justice.
A new landmark convention on cybercrime was adopted last year by the UN General Assembly and will be opened for signature later this year.
The convention includes specific provisions on online child sexual exploitation, and I am hopeful that it will bolster responses to cyber-enabled crime and exploitation across jurisdictions.
Which brings me to my second point on how exploitation persists in our changing world: organized crime is hiding behind its victims.
We see this most clearly in trafficking for forced criminality set-ups, like the online scam centres I have just described, where victims are being forced to victimize others.
We also see it in other criminal enterprises.
In Haiti, for example, armed gangs are recruiting children to carry out brutal acts of violence, to the point where minors now make up 30 to 50 per cent of their ranks.
And here in the UK, drug trafficking groups are exploiting around 4,000 teenagers a year to distribute their product, some of them as young as 12 years old.
This approach allows criminals to use victims as a buffer from accountability.
We see similar dynamics with victims of sexual exploitation, where initial victims are often used to recruit additional victims.
We also see traffickers blur the line between legal and illegal activity, particularly when exploiting people for forced labour.
Traffickers often target vulnerable people in industries like fishing, construction, hospitality, and agriculture.
Operating under the guise of legal companies, they hide their crimes under sub-contracts and intermediaries, making exploitation difficult to detect or trace.
In one case in Belgium, we even saw traffickers label exploited workers as “self-employed individuals”.
The ability to camouflage exploitation in large-scale industries creates huge barriers to ending impunity, particularly with long and complex global supply chains that are difficult to monitor.
It may be part of the reason why convictions for forced labour trafficking remain very low compared to other forms like sexual exploitation.
In some industries, forced labour bleeds into illegal and unregulated activity, like illegal mining and fishing.
Africa’s mining sector is a stark example, where a complex system of debt bondage and loose regulation enables traffickers to provide a steady supply of child and forced labour.
And that leads me to the third point I want to underline: human trafficking endures because it is not one homogenous criminal business.
It is a set of exploitative industries that share common characteristics and prey on common fragilities.
If you look at a map of global trafficking flows, you will see how they intersect with fragility and vulnerability, both within and across borders.
The greater share of detected human trafficking is in fact domestic, which accounted for almost 60 per cent of all human trafficking victims identified in 2022.
But this varies across regions and tells different stories.
Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, has a colossal domestic trafficking problem, and 83 per cent of detected trafficking in the region is domestic, including a deeply rooted market exploiting children for forced labour.
At the same time, Africa has tragically become a conveyor belt for victims to the rest of the world.
The continent accounts for a third of all cross-border trafficking victims detected globally in 2022, and African victims were identified in more destinations than any others.
Western and Southern Europe, on the other hand, is a destination region in global chains of exploitation.
Seventy-four per cent of detected trafficking in Europe was cross-border in 2022, and most European victims of trafficking are detected within Europe.
And we see the variables of risk in different migration flows.
Between 2020 and 2022, the number of unaccompanied children that arrived at the borders of the European Union surged, from under 15,000 to around 40,000.
Most of them were young boys from Africa and Asia. And during the same period, the detection of trafficking victims involving young boys from Africa and Asia skyrocketed in Southern and Western Europe.
We saw a very different story with the war in Ukraine. The conflict also triggered sizeable flows of migrants and refugees out of the country and into other parts of Europe, but this corresponded with only a limited increase in detected human trafficking.
The risks of trafficking in the case of Ukrainians seems to have been mitigated by measures like visa-free travel as well as rapid access to protection, shelter, and work permits.
The example of Ukraine shows that effective action can be taken to reduce trafficking risks.
We cannot and should not wait to end conflict or fix all the world’s problems, or eliminate every form of vulnerability, to end the massive and systematic human trafficking that is taking place today.
We need compassion and solidarity, and we need to be practical in our approach.
I want to leave you with some key spheres of action where I believe that being more ambitious can lead to real, long-term impact.
Firstly: data, research, and analysis are key.
We have made monumental progress in understanding and monitoring human trafficking. But so much of the picture remains incomplete. Across the globe, we still need much better data collection, coverage, and disaggregation, as well as better harmonization.
UNODC is developing a universal statistical classification on trafficking in persons with the International Organization on Migration.
We are also working with the International Labour Organization and the University of Georgia to develop a set of statistical standards to collect and analyze data on trafficking in persons.
I hope that academics like yourselves will work with us for better research, critique us constructively, and help us separate the scientific evidence from the noise.
Secondly, we need to educate people about trafficking and exploitation.
The victims of human trafficking are extremely diverse in gender, age, nationality, and socioeconomic background.
And the means and dynamics of exploitation and coercion are deeply complex.
Promoting greater awareness is crucial.
Educational institutions, media reporting, and public awareness efforts are all vital.
You can help us inform and educate, and UNODC has a broad range of resources publicly available on this topic.
Thirdly, criminal justice institutions in every part of the world need to be equipped to tackle human trafficking in the modern age.
They must be able to work together across borders to detect, investigate, and prosecute different forms of trafficking, and to work against vast and organized networks.
They must be able to swiftly acquire and use the evidence available, even when it is in digital form or in a different jurisdiction.
And they must promote greater inclusion within the justice sector, especially of women, who can improve the ability to detect and support victims.
Fourthly, we need to give more weight and meaning to the term “victim-centered”.
This starts with achieving justice for victims and ensuring that they get the protection they are entitled to.
But it also means giving them the tailored assistance they need to prevent them from being re-victimized, and preparing them to lead dignified lives with sustainable sources of income after their exploitation.
It means empowering victims to contribute to the criminal justice process as witnesses, and letting survivors lead as advocates on the subject.
Fifth and finally, we must pay closer attention to the underlying structures enabling trafficking and exploitation.
Economic models that prioritize output and efficiency without safeguards to protect human rights need to be re-examined, and the private sector needs to be accountable for the complex supply chains that provide all of us with the goods and products we use every day.
Labour protection needs to integrate more rigorous anti-trafficking measures, and labour authorities must become active players in the fight against trafficking.
The private sector and especially tech companies need to move beyond token measures and take real action, together with governments, to regulate their tools and platforms and enable prompt and decisive action.
Persisting inequalities and practices that excuse exploitation also need to be rejected without compromise.
These include forced marriage and child labour, barriers to education and financial inclusion faced by women and marginalized people, and outdated attitudes that contribute to victim blaming.
And finally, in the absence of peace and stability, people fleeing hardship must have safe routes, and people in vulnerable situations must receive minimum social protection, in line with international law.
Colleagues and friends,
Exploitation thrives on what we do not see, not because we cannot see it, but because we are not looking.
To end human trafficking, we need to open our eyes.
I urge the students and scholars joining us today to help expand the body of scientific evidence available, to continue to better understand how human trafficking works, and what works against it.
And I invite all of you to join us in promoting awareness seeking solutions to stop the exploitation and end human trafficking.
I thank you for your attention, and I look forward to hearing your thoughts.