Trafficking in persons is a serious crime that affects the human rights, dignity and integrity of all its victims including women, men, and children in the Association of Southeast Asia Nation (ASEAN) region. ASEAN has made efforts to fight human trafficking through inter alia the establishment of regional counter-human trafficking laws and human rights bodies to establish best norms and practices for its member countries. Nevertheless, the International Labour Organization (ILO) recently declared that there are more than 11.7 million forced labor victims in the Asia-Pacific region encompassing the biggest concentration of forced labour victims in the world. This volume reviews the achievements and the deficiencies of ASEAN’s counter-human strategies at the national and regional level. It offers suggestions for the reform of ASEAN's anti-trafficking laws and for the creation of a regional anti-trafficking human rights body specialized in preventing human trafficking, promoting equal protection of all trafficking victims, and prosecuting human traffickers.

Despite the high frequency of their interactions, the policy coordination process between the United Nations (UN) and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has been underexamined in global and regional governance and ASEAN studies literature. To chart this important terrain, this incisive book contributes to scholarship by investigating UN-ASEAN policy coordination in the case of trafficking in persons (TIP).

Concern over the issue of human trafficking in Southeast Asia has grown steadily over the past several years with recent events elevating this pernicious problem to crisis levels in the public consciousness. The unearthing of mass graves in trafficking camps in both Thailand and Malaysia, the discovery of hundreds of fishermen enslaved in Indonesia, and the steady stream of vulnerable Bangladeshi and Burmese Rohingya populations seeking refuge across the Andaman Sea have left many people speculating about the scale of the problem and struggling to find solutions. It is impossible to know definitively the scale or scope of human trafficking. This unsettling uncertainty arises, in part, from the lack of robust, accurate, and standardized data related to human trafficking--information that is critical to devising and implementing better policies to combat it. Policies and programs based on poor data will be equally poor in their effectiveness. The corrective impulse should focus not only on collecting more data, but better data. This data scarcity arises, in part, from the fact that those involved in human trafficking are inherently a hidden population. It is further challenged by insufficient institutionalization of the definition of human trafficking, corrupt practices linked to trafficking, and--whether owing to a lack of resources or an unawareness of proper research methodologies--the inability to properly gather and analyze such information. Though progress has been made, these challenges continue to confront ASEAN member states as they move later this year toward further economic consolidation and the adoption of the ASEAN Convention on Trafficking in Persons--events that make regional collaboration and standardization on the issue of human trafficking all the more critical. In support of this process, this report is intended as a resource for both ASEAN and the international anti-trafficking community in aiming to (1) establish a foundation of approaches to estimating hidden populations, (2) survey the field of current global and local prevalence measure methods, (3) outline normative and technical achievements and challenges that may guide future data collection and analysis in Southeast Asia, and (4) offer policy recommendations to advance understanding of the scale and scope of human trafficking.

Although human trafficking has a long and ignoble history, it is only recently that trafficking has become a major political issue for states and the international community and the subject of detailed international rules. Anne T. Gallagher calls on her direct experience working within the United Nations to chart the development of new international laws on this issue. She links these rules to the international law of state responsibility as well as key norms of international human rights law, transnational criminal law, refugee law and international criminal law, in the process identifying and explaining the major legal obligations of states with respect to preventing trafficking, protecting and supporting victims, and prosecuting perpetrators. This book is a groundbreaking work: a unique and valuable resource for policymakers, advocates, practitioners and scholars working in this controversial and important field.