Fact sheets  Trafficking in human beings      (Acrobat files)

International Conventions   The Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons Especially Women and Children, supplementing the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime (adopted and opened for signature 15 November 2000)    The Council of Europe Convention on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings (adopted and opened for signature 16 May 2005)

Trafficking in women is a criminal phenomenon that violates basic human rights, and totally destroying victims' lives. Countries are affected in various ways. Some see their young women being lured to leave their home country and ending up in the sex industry abroad. Other countries act mainly as transit countries, while several other receive foreign women who become victims of sexual exploitation.

It is a global problem in which INTERPOL actively seeks to increase and improve international law enforcement co-operation in order to help combat this crime.

INTERPOL derives its actions from such conventions as the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, and the additional Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons.

They give guidelines for law enforcement action and the following are some examples of those actions:

The protocol urges an increase in the information exchange between states in order to determine

• whether individuals crossing or attempting to cross an international border with travel documents belonging to other persons or without travel documents are perpetrators or victims of trafficking in persons,
  
  
• the types of travel document that individuals have used or attempted to use to cross an international border for the purpose of trafficking in persons, and
  
  
• the means and methods used by organized criminal groups for the purpose of trafficking in persons, including the recruitment and transportation of victims, routes and links between and among individuals and groups engaged in such trafficking, and possible means for detecting them.