Northumbria University academics, Professor Georgios A. Antonopoulos and Dr. Georgios Papanicolaou, were recently invited
to present their research on human trafficking at the Eleventh session of
the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Convention Against
Transnational Organised Crime (COP UNTOC) held in Vienna between 17th and
21st October 2022.
UNTOC, also called the
'Palermo Convention', is a 2000 United Nations-sponsored multilateral
treaty against transnational organised crime. The Convention was
adopted by a resolution of the United Nations General
Assembly on 15 November 2000 as the main legal international
instrument to fight organised crime, and to inform national legal frameworks
against organised crime.
UNTOC's three
supplementary protocols include the ‘Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and
Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children’, which contain
elements of the current international law
on human trafficking. The Conference of the Parties to the
Convention was established to improve the capacity of States Parties to combat
transnational organised crime and to promote and review the implementation
of this Convention.
Antonopoulos and
Papanicolaou’s research has explored how human trafficking has become embedded
into the legal economy in Greece – making it almost impossible to police
without labour market reform. The embeddedness of undocumented migrant labour
in several economic sectors, including agriculture, small manufacture and
small service business in Greece has rendered the conceptual umbrella of
'organised crime' counterproductive, when it comes to the prevention of human
trafficking and the prosecution of traffickers.
In their presentation,
they argued that the 'organised crime' framework diverts police attention
towards criminal organisation as a more robust criminal structure. Migrant
labour exploited in conditions that can be construed as trafficking is a much
more localised reality.
Dr. Papanicolaou
explained: “Preventing trafficking may be less a matter of criminal law
enforcement and special police organisation and tactics, and more a matter of
reforming the labour market. This could help create an environment that
is friendly to migrant labour and more densely regulated by a range of
pertinent authorities, such as labour inspectors, the revenue service and
social services.”
