Trafficking Trends, Formal Law Enforcement Cooperation, and Future Perspectives: The Cases of Belarus and Ukraine

Abstract

Belarus and Ukraine are two countries heavily affected by the traffic in human beings, particularly in women and children for purposes of sexual exploitation. At the same time, these countries have been at the forefront of the fight against this crime, and have made progress in developing strategies and taking political action to combat this crime. Both countries have distinct laws against human trafficking and specialized law enforcement units to address the problem, as well as progressively greater numbers of criminal cases filed and traffickers convicted. Yet law enforcement agencies in these two countries are still hampered in their efforts by numerous and varied obstacles stemming from their specific national contexts, as well as by shared problems, including a lack of adequate financial resources allocated to counter-trafficking efforts, legislative difficulties created by ambiguous provisions within current laws, limited national inter-agency cooperation, and a severe lack of responsiveness on the part of international law enforcement agencies in countries that are destinations for the victims of human trafficking. The latter issue often has its foundation in the fact that many of the home nations of victims of human trafficking lack certain law enforcement capacities and are still working on developing their own mechanisms of response to international law enforcement agencies. But it is equally due to the persistence of outdated and overly bureaucratic systems for the formal communication of operational and evidentiary information in the international law enforcement community. This severely handicaps the law enforcement response, and lessens the possibility of effective investigations and prosecutions across borders, which further frustrates and demoralizes those in the law enforcement community who are seeking to combat human trafficking. This essay will examine the specific issue of the effectiveness of formal law enforcement cooperation and its possible relation to current conditions and trends in human trafficking, in particular related to the formal exchange of operational and evidentiary information. This is recognized as a major problem and a constant point of frustration for law enforcement agencies in countries of origin, and one that is frequently raised by law enforcement representatives in various forums. However, little has been done to address this widely recognized problem, in particular with regard to the documentation and analysis of formal law enforcement cooperation. It is not the intention of this paper to provide any comprehensive overview of human trafficking as such, nor the law enforcement response to it in these two countries.