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Global agreement on migration can deliver a blow to traffickers of human misery and suffering

Yury Fedotov says an international effort is necessary to enshrine expectations on the treatment of migrants and refugees, as well as to break down criminal organisations who trade in people

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A suspected victim of human trafficking prays at a government shelter in the Takua Pa district of Phang Nga, Thailand, in October 2014. Photo: Reuters

“When I refused to sell my body, they sold me to another brothel.” This is the heart-rending testimony of a 13-year-old Nepalese girl named Skye, trafficked by relatives to India. Skye’s story ends better than most.

Together with her sister, Skye escaped from the brothel, returned to school and now works for the Nepalese organisation that rescued her: the globally renowned Shakti Samuha. But, for every survivor like Skye, thousands suffer in silence, gagged by the threat of violence and blackmail.

People labour in farms and factories, are coerced into the sex trade and tricked onto fishing boats. The range of coerced activities is as vast as the huge number of places where victims are found.
Today, we all need to be vigilant for signs of the modern-day slave trade: sexually exploited and brutalised women and girls; frightened children begging on street corners; and clusters of labourers squalidly living at their workplace. This is the harsh evidence of a crime that haunts all our societies.

How did it come to this in the early 21st century? Large numbers of victims are trapped in a hopeless circle of migrant smuggling and trafficking. The petrol fuelling these crimes is instability and insecurity.

Plug Hong Kong’s legal loopholes on human-trafficking and forced labour, legislator tells officials

Conflicts in Iraq and Syria, and economic crises elsewhere, have produced a tide of desperate humanity sweeping through the Middle East, North Africa and across the lethal Mediterranean. These individuals fall in and out of the hands of traffickers and smugglers as they seek sanctuary. Thousands are dying.
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