AML CHALLENGES
What you
need to know
about human
trafficking in
East Asia and
the Pacific
A
ccording to the International
Monetary Fund, funds laundered
in the world today could range
between two and five percent of the world’s
gross domestic product. Among the prominent criminal activities that are sourced
to money laundering is human trafficking. Although it’s convenient to regard the
world we live in as modern and advanced
— a world led by human rights — we in the
anti-money laundering industry have to
face the inconvenient truth that slavery in
its different modern forms still exists and,
moreover, generates substantial profits
around the world. Today, human trafficking has become one of the most profitable
illicit industries worldwide, generating
revenues of more than an estimated U.S.
$31 billion per year.
This article serves as a study of human
trafficking in East Asia and the Pacific.
Throughout the article, we examine the
role of the different countries in East
Asia with regard to human trafficking,
the extent of human trafficking in each of
these countries, the possible prominent
players in the crime and the current legal
measures taken in each country to confront the problem. The ultimate goal of the
article is to provide the AML professional
and reader with a geopolitical assessment
of the problem, its magnitude and the
16 acams today
|
existing preventive legal mechanisms. For
that reason, it is no coincidence that the
East Asia region was chosen for this study
— according to the International Labor
Organization (ILO) Report on Forced Labor
(2005), globally there are at least 2,450,000
people in forced labor as a result of trafficking in persons. Of these, more than
half — 1,360,000 people — are trafficked
in Asia and the Pacific.
The ILO report has divided trafficked
forced labor into the following forms:
Commercial sexual exploitation (43%),
Economic exploitation (32%) and Mixed
(25%). In this study, we refer to both forms
of human trafficking.
Legal definitions of
human trafficking
International definition
According to the United Nations (U.N.),
human trafficking is “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.”
November / December 2008
Many practitioners and organizations of
international law consider human trafficking to be a crime against humanity based
on this treaty that considers enslavement,
imprisonment and sexual slavery as such.
The U.N. has recognized in recent years
that the problem of human trafficking does
not stand by itself, but is rather intertwined
with financial-based, overarching crimes
such as organized crime and money laundering; one crime inherently leads to the
other, creating together international and
regional criminal networks. As an international organization, the U.N. addresses the
problem via its legal and executive tools
— conventions and relevant sub-organizations that try to transform the words of relevant conventions into actual deeds. One
of the prominent suborganizations that
address these issues is the United Nations
Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC), which
established The Global Program against
Trafficking in Human Beings (GPAT) to
assist countries combating human trafficking and to implement the Convention
of Transnational Organized Crime and
its anti-trafficking protocol. In addition,
there are U.N. regional organizations
such as the United Nations Economic and
Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific
(ESCAP) and the United Nations I