Human Trafficking and Slavery: Current Anti-Trafficking Efforts in Japan

Abstract

Human trafficking has often been discussed as a downside of globalization and is now identified as one of the fastest-growing areas of international organized criminal activity. The UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime was adopted in 2000 with the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress, and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children (hereinafter, the Trafficking Protocol). The significance of the protocol is that it includes labor exploitation and the removal of organs in addition to sexual exploitation in its definition of trafficking; under it, “trafficking in persons shall mean the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring, or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation. Exploitation shall include, at a minimum, the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labor or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude, or the removal of organs.”1