The European Commission published, on Wednesday 21 October, its third report on progress in the fight against trafficking in human beings since 2017, in which it notes that the number of victims is on the rise and that the majority of them are women and girls.
According to the institution's communiqué, progress has been made in several areas such as transnational cooperation “ thanks to the joint efforts of Europol and Eurojust”, but the crime continues to evolve and the Covid-19 pandemic has reinforced certain trends.
Trafficking accounts for around €30 billion of profit annually worldwide, and in the EU these profits are estimated at €3 billion.
According to the Commission, almost half of the victims of human trafficking in the EU are EU citizens (49%) and one third (34%) of them have been victims in their own Member State. The vast majority of victims are women and girls (72%) and one in four (22%) is a child.
While sexual exploitation remains the main purpose of trafficking, labour exploitation is also reported, particularly in the context of migration.
“The continued presence of children among the victims of trafficking is alarming”, the report notes. The vast majority of child victims in the EU were girls (78%) and more than 60% of child victims of trafficking in the EU were trafficked for the purpose of sexual exploitation. Child victims are also exploited to commit crimes, such as in the drug trade, and migrant children are particularly at risk, the report says.
In 2017/2018, a total of 14,145 victims were registered, a higher proportion than in the previous reporting period.
In the EU, the main countries where victims were detected were, in absolute numbers, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, the Netherlands and France.
Outside the EU, these were Morocco, China, Ukraine, India and Nigeria.
In contrast, only 6,163 prosecutions and 2,426 convictions were reported, notes the Commission, which also points out that trafficking “is increasingly online as traffickers make increasing use of the internet and social media to recruit and exploit victims”. In addition, the pandemic is causing delays in the identification of victims and access to justice.
Link to the report: https://bit.ly/34i32YP (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)