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Event Detail

Wilson Center Conference

Event Details

On January 6, 2003, the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Studies held a half-day conference on "Combating Human Trafficking: Key Approaches." There were two panels of three presenters each; the presenters represented academics, practitioners and activists in the field of human trafficking. Each presented research and experience on different regions of the world, including the Middle East, the European Union, Central Asia, Southeastern Europe and Southeast Asia. The conference opened with remarks from Dr. Haleh Esfandiari, Consulting Director of the Middle East and Women's Projects at the Wilson Center. The first panel was chaired by the former director of the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons at the U.S. State Department, Ambassador Nancy Ely-Raphel. Ambassador Ely-Raphel described human trafficking as the "dark side of globalization." She discussed the State Department's second annual Trafficking in Persons Report which ranks governments in a three tier system based on their efforts and commitment to combat trafficking. This year marks the first year in which possible non-humanitarian, non trade-related sanctions could be placed on countries who rank in Tier 3 of the report.

Other panelists included Andrea Bertone, Assistant Director of Project Hope International, a Washington, DC-based nongovernmental organization committed to fighting child trafficking and prostitution in Thailand and the United States who spoke of a growing "global social movement" to combat trafficking in the last decade which has arisen out of the transnational movement to fight violence against women. Emek Ucarer, assistant professor of International Relations at Bucknell University, spoke about the NGO involvement in European Union initiatives to combat trafficking. Much progress has been made in the European Union to end this form of human slavery, however, disagreements in Member States over key concepts - prostitution, voluntarism, abuse, coercion - continues to plague efforts to uniformize policies at the EU level.

Mohamed Mattar, co-director of the Protection Project of the Foreign Policy Institute at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies focused on the oft-ignored region of the Middle East and its experience with trafficking in human beings. Many people - men and women - are trafficked into the Middle East to work as domestic servants. However, their rights are not protected. Furthermore, there are social ambiguities when it comes to the issue of prostitution. Prostitution is actually legal in a number of Islamic countries: Turkey, Bangladesh, Indonesia and Lebanon. However, because nongovernmental organizations are not well supported, and faith-based organizations do not truly understand the issue of trafficking, this form of slavery will unfortunately continue.

The second panel, chaired by Anita Sharma, deputy director of the Conflict Prevention Project at the Wilson Center, included Kieth Sherper, an independent consultant, who was contracted by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to help set up a safe shelter in Tirana, Albania for women who had been sold into prostitution, but rescued and had returned home to Albania. Mr. Sherper provided insight into the social, political and economic factors which lead to the trafficking of women out of Albania into the sex trade elsewhere in Southeastern European and Western Europe. There are steps being taken at the government and the civil society levels to address trafficking, but the social mores against talking about this subject plays a role in the thwarting the effectiveness of these initiatives. The next presenter, Ruth Pojman, anti-trafficking adviser to the Europe and Eurasia Project of USAID, spoke about her efforts in Central Asia as one of the first to implement anti-trafficking programs with the International Organization for Migration. Trafficking in Central Asia has increased dramatically since the mid-1990s as the newly independent states of the Soviet Union struggled to incorporate capitalist systems. Instead, transnational organized crime has flourished and women and girls are most vulnerable to being exploited. Finally, Christina Arnold, founder and executive director of Project Hope International (PHI), spoke of the positive work of nongovernmental organizations in Thailand to combat trafficking and rehabilitate children who have been abused or sold into prostitution. PHI works in partnership with a Thai NGO, FACE (Fight Against Child Exploitation), and works to raise money for other child welfare shelters in Thailand. The NGOs in Thailand have been active for almost two decades as they discovered the scourge of sex tourism and trafficking long before it came on the radar screen of Western NGOs.