Trafficking in Persons: An Annotated Legal Bibliography

Introduction Trafficking in persons is an international human rights issue that has recently garnered significant attention on both international and national levels. This form of slavery has been practiced for hundreds of years, but only since the beginning of the 1990s has this issue been brought to the forefront of the United Nations and the United States human rights agenda. In particular, the phenomenon of trafficking in persons received broad recognition after the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union resulted in a dramatic increase in the numbers of victims of trafficking from that region. In recent years governments have made some efforts to prevent the act of trafficking, protect victims of trafficking, and prosecute cases of trafficking. There has also been a surge of domestic legislation recognizing trafficking in persons as a criminal offense and treating the trafficked person as a victim. In the United States, the Trafficking Victims Protection Act 1 was signed into law on October 28, 2000. On the international level, the 2000 United Nations Protocol to Prevent, Suppress, and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children, 2 supplementing the United Nations Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime, 3 has provided the first comprehensive international law to address the issue. As a result of this international and domestic attention, there has been an increase in the number of scholarly articles published in recent years analyzing the problem of trafficking in persons, its root causes, its forms, and ...