Sixty-first General Assembly: Third Committee (social, humanitarian and cultural).

The Third Committee during the sixty-first session of the General Assembly had at the top of its agenda the rights of women, children and migrants, as well as an evaluation of the work of the recently established Human Rights Council, and approved a draft resolution naming the right to development as a major goal of this new UN body. With many Member States expressing concern over the Council's early work, such measures may help to strengthen its relationship with the General Assembly. Specific human rights abuses in some countries, such as Iran, Myanmar and the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea, also took centre stage, with sharp disagreement among Member States on how to handle the alleged violations. "We need to put as much pressure as possible on countries to improve human rights conditions, and sometimes we are forced to follow the policy of name and shame", said Committee Chairman Hamid al Bayati of Iraq. "However, we also don't want to provoke them unnecessarily or accuse them of false things." Besides an overwhelming number of resolutions adopted by consensus, some of the main points of contention during the debate were the draft texts on specific human rights violations.

DEFENDING POOR WOMEN AGAINST 'SEX TRAFFICKING'

Looking holistically at human trafficking

A 12-year-old girl suffers severe beatings after trying to escape a brothel in Bangkok, Thailand, while a 14-year-old must serve up to six "customers" each night, thus contracting HIV in the process. In the Philippines, a family survives on wages earned by a daughter working as a prostitute overseas.

Trafficking for sex, which pulls women and girls into prostitution against their will, is an epidemic almost unspeakable in its darkness. The practice has joined unpaid labour and indentured servitude to make up a kind of modern-day slavery, commonly known as human trafficking. A resolution, sponsored by the Philippines and adopted unanimously by the Third Committee, is the latest in a string of progressive measures that seek to staunch the spread of forced sex labour. Besides addressing one of the most insidious problems facing the international community, this latest anti-trafficking resolution is also a case study in mobilization: learning what causes the problems and how to fix them, fast.

In Asia, perhaps the world's hub for sex trafficking, the practice became commonplace during the 1970s and 1980s. According to a non-governmental organization (NGO) called Vital Voices, the presence of foreign soldiers stationed in the region and an economic boom in Japan at that time led to a high demand for prostitution. Today, trafficked women are escorted by middlemen to bars and nightclubs that "purchase" and keep them against their will because of debt pressure and the threat of physical violence. "Poverty makes people vulnerable, and then evil people exploit their dreams of a better life", said Executive Director Antonio Maria Costa of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) at a recent event on human trafficking, which was co-sponsored by New York University. UNODC estimates that more than 2 million people worldwide are in some way under the control of traffickers. Although a vast majority of cases is most likely unreported, the estimated number of trafficked women runs as high as 10 million.

Signs of hope have surfaced as experts begin to look more holistically at the problem of human trafficking. The 2006 annual report of the UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights aspects of victims of trafficking in persons centres around the demand for commercial sexual exploitation and trafficking. "Demand must be understood as that which fosters exploitation, not necessarily as a demand directly for that exploitation", the report states. This broad look at demand places responsibility not just on traffickers and "prostitute-users", but also on "the economic, social, legal, political, institutional and cultural conditions, which oppress women and children throughout the world".

Targeting the social infrastructure in which trafficking thrives is a concept that evolved in many ways from the United Nations Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children, which was adopted in Vienna in 2000. The Protocol defines trafficking in persons as the "recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion", abduction, fraud or deception, for the purpose of exploitation, which includes forced labour, servitude, slavery and other forms of sexual exploitation. Member States that ratified the Protocol are obliged to enact domestic laws that make these activities criminal offences and pursue traffickers aggressively. UN regional assistance has made a big difference for many Protocol signatories. For example, the United Nations Inter-Agency Project on Human Trafficking in the Greater Mekong Sub-region provides support and research assistance to the region, including Cambodia, Thailand and four adjacent countries, where it is estimated that 225,000 women and children have been trafficked.

As the resolution on trafficking in persons demonstrates, this more holistic human rights perspective on trafficking is beginning to gain practical standing in the global community. Governments are urged to "take appropriate measures to address the root factors, including poverty and gender inequality". While focusing on the human rights of victims, the recent shift in anti-trafficking trends does not overlook the need for taking punitive judicial action against traffickers and prostitute-users. The resolution also calls for the criminalization of all forms of trafficking in persons and the condemnation and penalization of offenders, including the new practice of holding citizens of one State responsible for sex crimes they committed on foreign soil.

The Philippines, as the resolution's sponsor, has been particularly proactive in its judicial measures. Its first trafficking conviction under the 2003 law occurred in 2005, when 67 cases were under preliminary investigation and 31 filed for prosecution, according to a local newspaper. As a result, the Philippines has led the way in multilateral coordination and integrated efforts with the United Nations, launching an investigation into child pornography, in conjunction with the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF). In 2004, it was among 140 countries that responded to a unique questionnaire on anti-trafficking efforts, coordinated by the UN Division for the Advancement of Women. By posting these countries' complete responses online, the Division has been able to increase transparency and accountability and to publicize success stories like the Philippines.

According to those responses, grass-roots efforts to train women in practical skills, eradicate rural poverty and promote gender issues are being accomplished largely through the work of NGOs. An example is the Consortium Against Trafficking of Children and Women in Sexual Exploitation, in the Philippines, which performs outreach activities in bars and nightclubs in Cebu City and has been able to lobby the region to adopt gender-training models in its high school programmes. In March 2007, UNODC will co-sponsor the Abu Dhabi Global Initiative to End Trafficking in Persons in the United Arab Emirates. Just as Beijing became synonymous with women's rights and Kyoto with environmental issues, Mr. Costa urged the international community to join UNODC in making Abu Dhabi a counterpart for another historic gathering, saying that the meeting should firmly establish protective measures, raise international awareness and help States tackle the root causes of trafficking. "This is not a wish list", he added. "This is international law."

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For more information on human trafficking, please visit http://unodc.org and http://www.vitalvoices.org. For country-specific action, visit http://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/Revenglish/responses.htm