The world celebrates the International Day to Combat Human Trafficking, which falls on the 30th of July every year. In this regard, the United Nations said that human trafficking is “a serious crime and a flagrant violation of human rights, affecting thousands of men, women and children who fall prey to traffickers, whether in their own countries or abroad. Every country in the world is affected by the phenomenon of human trafficking, whether that country is the country of origin, transit point or destination for the victims.
The US Agency for Development said, “Data for 2022 showed that there were more than 27 million victims of trafficking, about 3.3 million of them children, a number that has nearly tripled in the past fifteen years. And since human trafficking remains so understudied and underreported, the real numbers are, in all likelihood, much higher.”
In this regard, Adil Chiquito, head of the Moroccan League for the Defense of Human Rights, said that “given the multiplicity of manifestations and crimes of human trafficking, it can be said that there is an almost institutional and structural inability to eliminate and confront this inhuman phenomenon, which has reached the point of not being able to unify a national database.” And the inconsistency in the data, especially if this crime includes, as defined in the protocol attached to the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, multiple crimes.
Chiquito explained, in a statement to Hespress, that “although Morocco has taken important steps in the legislative aspect by ratifying the United Nations Convention against Organized Crime in 2002, and its supplementary protocol in 2009, and it issued Law No. 27.14 related to combating human trafficking in 2016, and established on At the procedural level, the National Committee for Coordinating Actions to Combat Human Trafficking in 2018, however, these efforts remain limited in the face of the staggering rise in human trafficking crimes and the development of means and techniques for their commission.
And the head of the Moroccan League for the Defense of Human Rights considered that the matter “requires a comprehensive review of laws that do not appear to be in line with what is practiced on the ground, due to broad definitions, while the law must be precise, by developing a meticulous procedural and procedural concept.”
The same human rights activist said, “The government is supposed to work to enact a horizontal policy of convergence that strengthens cooperation mechanisms between all concerned agencies, especially the judiciary, in order to enable a collective fight against this type of crime.”
And he added: “Since the occasion is a condition, the institutions concerned with the protection of human rights as well as Moroccan diplomacy must shed intense light on phenomena that fall within the scope of human trafficking crimes, including the high frequency of work of cross-border prostitution networks in all its manifestations, people smuggling networks and clandestine immigration.” And most importantly, the forced displacement of children detained in the Tindouf camps and forcing them to carry arms and be recruited under threat in camps in Latin America.
For his part, Shakib al-Khayari, a human rights activist, said, “The crime of human trafficking is considered a complex and complex crime, as it is confused with a group of crimes that are similar to it in some elements, such as the crime of smuggling migrants, exploitation in prostitution, and others. Some practices at the judicial level make human trafficking victims criminals.”
In this regard, al-Khayari stated, in a statement to Hespress, that “the Chief Public Prosecutor had previously sent a memorandum to the Public Prosecution Office in 2018, in which he confirmed that some people who were prosecuted for crimes of corruption and prostitution, for example, were, in fact, victims of human trafficking crimes.”
He added, “There is also a great weakness in combating this crime when it comes to child begging, as this is done in plain sight, although the Presidency of the Public Prosecution Office issued this year, with UNICEF, a practical guide on indicators for identifying child victims of human trafficking crimes.” “.
Al-Khayari stressed that “this requires raising the capacities of the various components of the law enforcement authorities to combat this phenomenon, which only begins with good training in this field, especially for those working in the field of justice.”