The Caritas submission to the Global Initiative to Fight Human Trafficking  United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Vienna, February 2008:

Caritas Internationalis, the network of 162 national Catholic charities, calls for migration and economic policies that reduce vulnerability to trafficking, but also that reaffirm tackling the root causes of trafficking by sustained action towards the Millennium Development Goals.

Combating trafficking is about upholding human dignity, the fight against poverty, and the promotion and defence of human rights. All these elements are at the very heart of the mission and work of Caritas.

Caritas strongly condemns the trafficking of human beings “created in God’s image, treated as slaves” as criminal acts, which violate basic human rights and the inviolable dignity and integrity of the human person.

Human trafficking is fuelled by poverty, which is often aggravated by violence, injustice and the lack of opportunities that makes people vulnerable to the criminals. In a legitimate search for decent living conditions, or plain survival, hundreds of thousands of people – increasingly women – leave their communities and are lured or trapped into slavery.

Caritas calls on world leaders, in particular those from the richest nations, to honour the commitments they made to tackle poverty and to achieve the Millennium Development Goals. These many unfulfilled pledges are engendering despair and dehumanizing injustice, and that’s what trafficking and slavery mean.

Caritas is involved worldwide into the fight against human trafficking:

• in advocating for the rights and for the protection of trafficked persons, for effective anti-trafficking legislation and measures, and for effective enforcement of such legislation and measures,
• in raising public awareness,
• in enabling people to take necessary actions with regard to trafficking in human beings and thus preventing trafficking,
• in working with vulnerable groups to find alternatives,
• in assisting and protecting trafficked persons,
• in advocating for migration policies and economic policies that reduce vulnerability of people to trafficking,
• in networking with authorities, churches and relevant actors in international civil society to jointly elaborate effective partnerships to challenge the human trafficking phenomenon. 

Caritas initiated the ecumenical COATNET network (Christian Organisations against Trafficking), and is engaged in effective partnership with religious orders worldwide.

For more information, please contact Caritas Internationalis Head of Communications Patrick Nicholson on 0039 06 698 79725 or 0039 334 3590700 or nicholson@caritas.va