20th Parliamentary Intelligence-Security Forum – Human Trafficking/Illicit Finance
To finish the panel, Hon. John Richmond, former U.S. Ambassador at Large to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Person, offers three policy trends, then some solutions for hope. First, Richmond makes sure to point out, similar to the others, that Human Trafficking is a crime of coercion and finance. It is an act very distinct from human smuggling, as human smuggling includes borders and sometimes can be a willing situation.
Hon. Richmond first introduces his first policy trend. He claims that illicit finance floats, therefore the USA and its allies can often track money to get a trail. The Allies can look at ledgers of countries and the hubs of such brothels. In order to do this, the Allies can use algorithms to scrape and see where the money lies. Once that is known, Hon. Richmond suggests that the Allies need to find out whether the people are trafficked through coercion or voluntarily. Access to financial flows and information is needed.
Next, Hon. Richmond describes the second policy trend – goods that are made by forced labor. Though banned in 1930, many companies, sometimes unknowingly, employ supply chains that root themselves back to other countries where forced labor permeates. After some tampering with the original bill in 2015, Hon. Richmond explains that slow progress was made in helping companies break down their supply chains. Lastly, Hon. Richmond tells the audience that since the US began to block goods made with forced labor, the new NAFTA agreement and the EU has made strides in revealing information on where, what, and how Allied nations’ supply chains operate.
Hon. Richmond’s final policy trend lies in “disclosure to diligence.” As he stated earlier in his discussion, companies in states and other countries need to first disclose the details of their supply chains, and once they have investigated and disclosed their supply chains, due diligence must be brought to companies who discover human trafficking within their chains. Hon. Richmond makes the final argument that poverty does not cause human trafficking, but rather is correlated with it. Traffickers target the vulnerable because they are the easiest to coerce. Hon. Richmond finishes by saying that the root cause of human trafficking is the traffickers, and causation and correlation are not the same.
