Monitoring Desk
ISLAMABAD/VIENNA: The United Nations (UN) said in a report on Tuesday that the Covid-19 pandemic led to the first drop in the known number of human trafficking in 20 years as trafficking opportunities and policing were reduced, but the Russia-Ukraine war has probably now caused a new surge.
United Nations’ stance on the human trafficking
The number of detected human-trafficking victims fell by 11% in 2020, the recent year for which data is available in most nations, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) said in its seventh international Report on Trafficking in Persons.
“In the year 2020, for the first time, the number of victims detected internationally decreased,” the UNODC said in the summary of a report, adding that the biggest drops were reported in low- and middle-income nations, particularly in the south and central America but also sub-Saharan Africa, Pacific region and east Asia.
It said that this change in trends could be the result of three different factors affecting especially low- and medium-income nations during the pandemic: the lower institutional capacity to detect victims, fewer opportunities for human traffickers to operate due to covid preventive restrictions, and few trafficking forms moving to hidden and less likely to be detected locations.
UN said that initial data for 2021 from just twenty countries suggests a further fall in 2021 in parts of southeast Asia, central America, and the Caribbean.
UN report said that trafficking for sexual exploitation saw the sharpest drop of 24 percent. For the first time since the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime started collecting data, it detected trafficking in this category as the percentage as a whole was roughly the same level as that of trafficking for forced labour, at around 39 per cent each.
