Zubair Qureshi
Sustainable Social Development Organization (SSDO) has issued a policy brief on threat assessment of trafficking in persons and smuggling of migrants in Pakistan.
Pakistan as country needs to prepare indigenous threat assessment policy to cater human trafficking and smuggling that can provide empirical evidence, emerging threats and visibility about the nature and extent of crime and its connections with international trends, says the policy brief.
As per report of Bureau of Emigration and Overseas Employment of Pakistan, 832,339 Pakistanis emigrated to other countries legally in 2022 and around 316,000 emigrated till May 2023.
According to the report, organized crimes of global scale are many, but given the geography and economic situation of Pakistan, its people are becoming more vulnerable to human trafficking and human smuggling.
It was recommended in the policy brief that once a national and indigenous threat assessment is in place; a robust action plan can be prepared with oversight mechanism by the Council of Common Interests (CCI) that includes federal and provincial elected political leadership of Pakistan.
The armed forces deputed to police international borders may also be included in the governing structure to oversee the implementation of the action plan. It must spell out a methodology for threat assessment. SSDO suggested that the threat assessment must use measurable and quantitative data sets to provide empirical basis of the trafficking in persons and human smuggling from Pakistan.
The threat assessment needs to consider the cybercrime dimension of trafficking and smuggling of persons into account. The flow of funds and money laundering aspects of the trafficking in persons be explored to identify the beneficiaries of the illegal acts.
SSDO stressed that the role of federal and provincial governments and the mechanism of coordination between them and the local and cross border routes that are used to carry out human trafficking and smuggling must be identified and the nexus between drugs and human trafficking may be examined to see how organized crimes are supplementing each other.
In the policy brief it was also suggested that justice sector response to human trafficking may be examined to identify gaps that must be addressed to make the prosecutions effective. The assessment may be made for women and children to see how vulnerable they are to the organized crimes of human trafficking and human smuggling. It was recommended that threat assessment must be periodical i.e., may be carried out at least on biannual basis and identifying geographic hotspots that are seen as recruiting and breeding grounds for traffickers.
SSDO believes that the ultimate purpose of the threat assessment should be to ensure that ‘preventive’ measures become central to response of the state.
