Human Trafficking in Russia and Ukraine

Human trafficking and exploitation have been in existence since the beginning of time. This paper focuses on the underground economy of human trafficking and its relation to the transitioning economies of Russia and Ukraine. To understand the scope of the issue of human trafficking on transitioning economies, the history and origination of the issue must be clearly understood. The emergence of human trafficking, also commonly referred to as modern day slavery, can be dated back to the beginning of the 20th century; the start of slavery when humans were trafficked for mainly for labor. Records of human slavery within Europe date back to ancient Greece and Rome, but the practice did not end in ancient history. There are long-standing historical precedents for the exploitation of Slavs within Western Europe. It is commonly perceived that slavery disappeared from Europe many centuries ago. There was little knowledge of the active slave market in Palermo Sicily, with slaves being brought from Africa until the middle of the nineteenth century. Much of the slave trade was ran by legitimate actors and companies sanctioned by the state. An active slave trade with Africa flourished in the large colonial powers of Europe such as England and some of the smaller colonial powers such as Portugal. In addition to Africans, indigenous American populations were also enslaved in the colonies of Central and South America and the Caribbean. When the importation of slaves was outlawed in the colonies, bonded labor or indentured servitude, often with individuals from Asia, helped to meet the labor shortage in agriculture. At the end of the nineteenth century, a new form of slavery, the “white slavery” began. The white slave trade bought women, often by means of deception, from Western and Eastern Europe into the brothels of North and South America. During World War II, new forms of human slavery emerged. Women began to be trafficked into prostitution to serve the German troops. But what differentiates slavery from the current human trafficking? Unlike the past, human trafficking it is not controlled or sanctioned by the state, as was the African slave trade, the enslavement of native populations in the New World or the slave labor of the Third Reich. Apart from those who individuals who managed the white slave trade, enslavers were not organized criminals or crime networks. Instead, today criminal groups and networks control trafficking and increasingly assume the important role as facilitators of human trafficking.

Human Trafficking as defined in Article 3, paragraph (a) of the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficker in Persons defines Trafficking in persons as the

“recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring or receipt of persons by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments