‘Decent work’ isn’t always possible. Advocates should stop shying away from criminal justice in anti-trafficking

The Beyond Trafficking and Slavery (BTS) project on openDemocracy has been documenting and directing discourse around the counter-trafficking and anti-slavery movement for a decade. During that time, it helped bring about several key changes to the field.

These include: moving the discussion beyond criminal justice to focus attention on the structural issues underpinning human exploitation. Shifting perceptions of trafficked people from passive victims of fate to active survivors shaping their own stories. And modernising conceptions of ‘slavery’ to capture the systems exploiting those downstream for the profit of those upstream.

These are all important achievements. Stakeholders are right to celebrate the widening of the conversation to also focus on labour rights. But there is a risk of the pendulum swinging too far in this direction, if BTS is suggesting that criminal justice is never the right response to trafficking.

This sort of absolutism is as unhelpful as the absolutism of those who insist criminal justice is the only effective response to human trafficking. It’s worth remembering that the criminal approach, enacted into international law 25 years ago, achieved wins that more than a century’s worth of anti-slavery legislation and decades of human rights activism had not. It’s also worth remembering that labour rights are a poor solution for work that shouldn’t exist in the first place.

Criminal justice and labour rights are powerful, complementary frameworks for addressing exploitation. Alone they are only ever partial solutions. Together they can fill each other’s gaps.

The success of criminal justice

The criminal justice response is set out in the Trafficking in Persons Protocol supplementing the Transnational Convention against Organized Crime.

By focusing on crime rather than rights, vastly different countries could gather around the same table to draft the protocol. The pragmatic compromises reached during the negotiation process resulted in treaties that have been almost universally ratified (most recently by Somalia in March of 2025), with common prevention, prosecution and protection objectives reflected in regional and national responses.

Most countries have enacted trafficking-specific laws that broadly align with the international definition. This harmonised understanding has meant that what was unheard of before has now permeated public consciousness.

It has also sensitised police to the possibility that the people they encounter may be victims of trafficking, with protection and assistance entitlements flowing from that status. Identification systems have been established in many countries alongside assistance and protection infrastructure, with compensation available to trafficked persons as victims of serious crime.

On the basis of this framework, multi-disciplinary counter-trafficking bodies, policies and plans of action have been established as well. While conviction rates are uneven across regions, they are generally increasing.

Some prosecutions have even been achieved through international cooperation, which would not have happened without consensus on the need for a global criminal justice approach. Had labour rights fully captured the issue, Interpol and Europol would not be involved in dismantling transnational trafficking networks, as they are today.

The architects of this international framework could not have anticipated the scale of trafficking that confronts us today, nor the shifting flows that have turned origin countries into key destinations for victims of trafficking. These changes underscore that the criminal justice approach remains fit for purpose.

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Beyond labour rights

BTS and other platforms have successfully challenged sensationalist accounts of human trafficking that paint it as exclusively perpetrated by organised gangs of powerful, ruthless villains. Its articles have painted a more complex and complete picture of what exploitation looks like and where it comes from today.

It is true that much of what gets labelled ‘modern slavery’ does not involve identifiable, arrestable criminals. It rather emerges from the ways people survive structural inequality. In these areas, BTS’s preferred prescription of labour rights and better working conditions would generally improve lives.

But striving for ‘decent work’ isn’t a solution when we reach the smaller slice of this overall phenomenon that actually involves traffickers – identifiable criminals who profit from organised human exploitation. For this, criminal justice is called for.

Take what is likely the biggest (in both scale and severity) human trafficking crisis in the 25 years since the Trafficking in Persons Protocol was enacted: the cyber-scamming industry. Organised criminals have reaped billions of dollars of illicit profits by forcing tens or even hundreds of thousands of people to scam other people.

According to a recent report from UNODC, trafficking into this forced criminality happens like this: a person – who may be tertiary educated – applies for a digital marketing job. After several rounds of interviews, he or she is recruited and travel arrangements are made to their new workplace.

Upon arrival at a heavily guarded compound, their passport and phone are taken from them. At this point they are told that their ‘job’ is to cultivate online connections and manipulate targets to invest in cryptocurrency. If they refuse, or fail to meet a given quota of ‘customer losses’, they are punished with physical torture, or sold to other scamming companies, or into sexual exploitation. Some have been murdered.

The victims imprisoned in these compounds – and I say victim rather than survivor, because not all of those still in these situations will survive – are both migrants and citizens. The perpetrators are also a complex combination of the two, and their influence on host countries is not always condemned – at times it’s even commended. Profits from scamming, estimated to be worth between $500 billion and more than $1 trillion annually, enrich powerful business tycoons and the political elites they have partnered with.

Most would agree that scamming is a criminal enterprise where labour rights cannot reach

In such a context, it is hard to imagine that counter-trafficking activists would propose that we should legalise cyber-scamming and improve the labour rights of migrant and local workers forced into criminality. They’re unlikely to suggest that labour inspectors be sent into compounds run by powerful organised crime groups – who are involved in money laundering, corruption, environmental crimes, drug, wildlife, and arms dealing alongside human trafficking – to check whether the people made to commit these crimes enjoy workplace protections and are free to unionise.

Most would agree that scamming is a criminal enterprise where labour rights, by definition, cannot reach. They would also, hopefully, agree that the harms of scamming are intolerable and should not be legalised just so labour rights can apply to that area of economic activity. I’d like to think that they’d conclude that a different solution – a criminal justice solution – is needed for cases where the activity is and should remain illegal.

But challenges arise from the reality that, mingled among those who have been trafficked, are people who want to be there. This complexity – combined with the influence of counter-trafficking narratives that have promoted concern about migrant worker exploitation over criminality – has resulted in some states looking even at criminal activity through a labour lens. There have even been cases of authorities pointing to the ‘contracts’ victims have signed, not as evidence of the litany of crimes taking place, but to classify trafficking situations as labour disputes.

This is nonsense. The people working in criminal industries like scamming should not have their working conditions improved. They should be removed from the situation and the compounds shut behind them. To suggest otherwise is to imply that scamming is a legitimate activity. That ‘scamming work is work’.

Labour rights approaches come up short when we are talking about economic activity that should not be promoted as viable work. And counter-trafficking activists who claim human trafficking does not involve organised crime find themselves at a loss when it does.

Similar problems are presented by the commercial sex industry. This is an area where the legitimacy and tolerability of the activity are fiercely contested, and where social norms around both buying and selling sex have proven culturally and contextually relative, and flexible over time.

As BTS asked of me, I got off the fence on sex worker rights. I am for them. But I still struggle to see sex work as something that should be promoted at unemployment offices or vocational training institutes. It also remains obvious to me that, even where sex work is decriminalised and workers’ rights are protected, people in the industry can still be victims of exploitation, coercion, and other serious crimes. Labour rights provide no answer to children in that industry, for example. When crimes occur, criminal law – not labour law – should intervene.

There is no question that criminal justice responses to trafficking have violated human rights and been weaponised against the wrong people. If it were not so, there would be more billionaire criminals in prisons than there are poor people mistreated as offenders. If the criminal justice system worked as it should, victims of trafficking would be more willing to engage with it. That many states have proven unable or unwilling to combat the transnational organised crime involved in human trafficking speaks to the need to rise to challenges prescribed by that approach, not abandon them.

Looking at, rather than Beyond Trafficking and Slavery

The deficiencies of criminal justice efforts to date should not lead actors to conclude that a purely labour rights approach offers them a solution.

BTS has advocated for better work conditions in sectors where exploitation take place. It has nuanced analysis of causes and drivers of exploitation, looking at factors that make both people and places vulnerable to exploitation. It has promoted ways to improve working conditions by addressing the structural and socio-economic factors that contribute to exploitation. In essence, it has looked – as its name suggests – ‘beyond trafficking and slavery’.

But BTS has less to say in response to actual trafficking and slavery – the kind that rises to the level of serious crime confronted by the criminal justice approach set out in international law. A richer response would be achieved if the two approaches were not pitted against each other as alternatives, but treated as different pieces of the same puzzle. The labour rights approach is necessary to address root causes and structural determinants of exploitation. When those efforts fail to prevent organised crime groups from trafficking and enslaving people for profit, the police need to do their job.

BTS would support them in that endeavour if it gave a voice to those working to fight crime, and unpacked the risks and challenges they face. It is right to hold criminal justice respondents to account for their failings, but at the same time the necessity of their role must be acknowledged.

Accepting this would also help secure anti-trafficking and anti-exploitation work in an uncertain future. The cessation of USAID-funding has highlighted the vulnerabilities of our inter-connected and inter-dependent globe. The counter-trafficking sector would likely prove more resilient to political storms if labour rights and criminal justice were seen as complementary parts of the same project.

If compassion is no longer a sufficient justification for foreign aid, the selling point for a labour rights approach may be the multiplier effect of worker contributions into legitimate economies. For criminal justice approaches, tax payers may be persuaded by the return on their investment if they see criminal scammer groups targeting their communities publicly dismantled. Both approaches contribute to human and national security and stability.

The funding freeze has not frozen international obligations. Whether and how countries fulfill their obligations without donor interests as a determinant of action, will reveal the extent to which labour rights and/or criminal justice approaches have taken root. We must hope that both survive.