Trafficking in Human Beings for Forced Labour. Contemporary Trends and Threats

Abstract

The article is devoted to the issue of human trafficking in legal and criminological terms, with particular emphasis on the exploitation of victims of the crime for work or forced services. The author introduces the essence of forced labour by reaching for many of its legal definitions contained in legal acts in the rank of conventions, as well as ordinary laws. At the same time, it highlights the factors that characterize the type of work indicated and allow to distinguish it from other types of violations, including violation of employee rights. The phenomenon of human trafficking is shown through the prism of its current evaluation tendencies, both globally and regionally (European, and especially EU). To this end, the author presents statistical data collected in recent years by, inter alia, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, the International Labour Organization, the International Organization for Migration and the European Commission. She emphasizes, however, that the actual scale of the aforementioned crime remains unknown. A significant part of the discussion focuses on the issue of human trafficking in modern Poland, showing the scale of the dealings in question, diagnosed in recent years by law enforcement agencies. A lot of attention is also paid to the spectrum of crime threats on the Polish labour market from the perspective of foreigners. Thus, with particular care, she considers the problem of violating the employment rights of Ukrainian citizens as the largest group of foreigners illegally employed in Poland. She also shows the legal situation in this area of the citizens of Belarus, Moldova, India and Russia. She discusses this issue in the context of activities of the National Labour Inspectorate included in the audit report for 2017. The author further scientific interest includes the issue of criminalization of human trafficking in selected countries around the world. In this respect, it refers primarily to legal regulations contained in the Latvian, Hungarian, Swiss, Finnish, Ukrainian and Liechtenstein penal codes. The author’s ambition was to present the indicated issues in a concise manner, while also taking into account its most important aspects.