Wednesday, March 12, 2014

Clearing the Slate for Trafficking Victims

In today's post, Co-editor Cynthia Soohoo, Director of the International Women's Human Rights Clinic at CUNY Law School, reports on new and promising approaches to address the criminalization of trafficking victims in the US, while also suggesting that more resources should be focused on prevention.  Additional information on the international human rights obligations relating to trafficking is available from the UN Special Rapporteur on Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children,

By Cynthia Soohoo

In late February, the International Women’s Human Rights Clinic at the City University of New York,  released a report on the criminalization of victims of sex trafficking.

The clinic’s work on this issue started with a collaboration with the Legal Aid Society’s Trafficking Victim’s Advocacy Project to represent clients under a groundbreaking 2010 New York law that allows individuals who have been trafficking into the sex trade to vacate prostitution related convictions.  Since 2010, 15 other states have passed similar vacatur laws.

Human trafficking is a severe human rights abuse, and because prostitution is illegal, trafficking into the sex trade raises the additional threat that victims will face arrest and prosecution for acts they were forced to commit.   Criminal convictions can continue to haunt victims long after a trafficking situation has ended preventing them from education, employment and housing and forcing them to live with the stigma of criminal convictions.

The report discusses the impact of the NY vacatur law and best practices for states thinking about adopting similar laws.

The report also looks at why individuals trafficked into the sex trade end up with criminal convictions in the first instance.  The report describes how policing policies often focus on high rates of prostitution arrests without adequate training or resources to identify sex trafficking victims. Faced with high volumes of defendants and inadequate resources, the courts and defense attorneys face tremendous pressure to move low level offenses quickly, often resulting in guilty pleas before there is adequate opportunity to identify trafficking victims.

Human right standards recognize that governments have an obligation to protect trafficking victims and to ensure that they are not criminally penalized for acts they were forced to commit. 
It is promising to see new approaches, like the vacatur laws, to address the criminalization of trafficking victims.  However, the report discusses the need for greater emphasis on and resources for providing services and assistance to trafficking victims before arrest and outside of the criminal justice system.

https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/human_rights/2014/03/clearing-the-slate-for-trafficking-victims.html

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