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Michael Olugbode in Abuja

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) has launched its 2022 Global Report on Trafficking in Persons, showing a drop in cases of trafficking as a result of outbreak of COVID-19.

The report covered 141 countries and providing an overview of patterns and flows of trafficking in persons at global, regional, and national levels, based on trafficking cases detected between 2017 and 2021.

According to a statement yesterday, the report drew upon the largest existing dataset on trafficking in persons, with information on the more than 450,000 victims and 300,000 (suspected) offenders detected worldwide between 2003 and 2021 while noting the role of organised crime groups as the engine behind long-distance trafficking.

For the first time, the number of victims detected globally decreased by 11 per cent, it stated. The reduction was largely driven by low- and medium-low-income countries and due to lower institutional capacity to detect victims, fewer opportunities for traffickers to operate (taking into consideration the COVID-19 context), and some trafficking forms moving to more hidden locations less likely to be detected.  Notwithstanding, some regions such as western & southern Europe, Eastern Europe & Central Asia, Central & South-Eastern Europe, as well as North America, recorded an increase in detection.

The statement revealed that the global tendency was verified in Nigeria as well, with the National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP) statistics that showed 1076 cases of trafficking in persons recorded in 2018 against 1032 cases in 2020.

“COVID-19, is sad to have had an important impact on trafficking flows. In Sub-Saharan Africa, border closures and travel restrictions led to a 36 per cent drop in cross-border trafficking victims detected between 2019 and 2020, but however, detected domestic trafficking victims increased by 24 per cent over the same period.”

The statement also stated that the COVID-19 pandemic equally accelerated a global slowdown in convictions.

“A 27 per cent reduction in convictions was recorded globally in 2020. Sub-Saharan Africa experienced a six per cent drop in its conviction rate in 2020 compared to 2019.

“This observation is less pronounced in Nigeria. Although there was a decrease in the number of persons brought into formal contact with the police and/or criminal justice system for TIP-related affairs (823 persons in 2018 compared to 701 in 2019 and 733 in 2020) as well as in the numbers of persons prosecuted (113 in 2017 versus 87 in 2020), the number of persons convicted of trafficking in persons very slightly increased with 50 convictions in 2018 and 51 convictions in 2020. There was however a big drop in 2019 with only 25 convictions recorded in Nigeria for that year,” according to the statement.