The Council of Europe's Group of Experts on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings (GRETA) has published its latest general report of activities, highlighting the key achievements in 2023. These include the publication of 11 new country evaluation reports (in respect of Azerbaijan, Estonia, Greece, Iceland, the Netherlands, North Macedonia, Poland, Serbia, Slovenia, Spain and Sweden) and the launch of the fourth evaluation round of the Council of Europe Convention on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings, with a thematic focus on vulnerabilities to human trafficking.
The report includes a stocktaking of the third evaluation round of the Convention, which focused on trafficking victims' access to justice and effective remedies. With this round of evaluation being completed in respect of most of the State Parties to the Convention by the end of 2023, GRETA analyses trends emerging from its country reports, drawing attention to gaps in the implementation of the Convention, as well as promising practices.
GRETA alerts that information is not provided in a manner that takes into account the situation of victims of trafficking and is not always comprehensible to victims. This can be aggravated by the fact that a number of states have problems in ensuring access to qualified and independent interpreters for victims of trafficking.
The report also points out at difficulties that victims of trafficking encounter in access to legal assistance and notes that in several countries legal aid is not available for some categories of victims of human trafficking, like undocumented migrants. Further, there is a lack of lawyers who are trained and specialised to represent victims of trafficking.
"Access to legal assistance and free legal aid is essential for facilitating and guaranteeing access to justice," said Helga Gayer, President of GRETA. "It is important to have access to a lawyer as soon as there are reasonable grounds for believing that a person is a victim of trafficking, before the person makes an official statement or decides whether to co-operate with the authorities. Early access to legal assistance is also important to enable victims to take civil actions for compensation", she added.
GRETA also notes that in many countries, trafficking victims face barriers in obtaining effective access to the labour market, which makes them vulnerable to new exploitation. The challenges are related, for example, to the residence status of the victims and their lack of a bank account to which salaries can be paid.
Furthermore, obtaining compensation from the perpetrators in the context of criminal or civil proceedings is challenging. Compensation awarded by courts is rarely paid to victims because the perpetrators' assets have not been identified and frozen at an early stage. Moreover, state compensation schemes are rarely applied in practice to victims of trafficking due to restrictive criteria and lack of free legal aid to claim state compensation.
On the positive side, several State Parties have implemented legislative changes and/or issued specific guidelines related to the non-punishment provision. However, gaps in identifying victims of trafficking continue hampering the application of the non-punishment principle.
The Council of Europe anti-trafficking body is concerned by the low number of prosecutions and convictions for human trafficking and stresses that failure to convict traffickers and the absence of effective sentences engenders a culture of impunity. A recurring challenge is that human trafficking cases are requalified as other offences which carry lighter penalties and deprive trafficking victims of access to certain rights.
The report also presents situations when GRETA's monitoring work led to improvements in the implementation of the Convention and highlands promising practices in several countries.
A dedicated section of the report concerns the prevention and detection of cases of human trafficking amongst persons displaced by Russia's war against Ukraine. According to available information, the number of confirmed cases of human trafficking of Ukrainian refugees since the onset of the war remains low, which may be a sign of success of the early preventive measures taken to protect Ukrainian refugees and mitigate the risks of trafficking. At the same time, GRETA stresses that the identification of victims of trafficking in human beings is challenging because victims may be reluctant to lodge complaints as they are often dependent for work or housing on their traffickers and exploiters.
GRETA plans a visit to Ukraine in 2024 to evaluate directly on the ground the consequences of the war on the fight against trafficking in human beings, including the issue of the forcible transfers and deportations of children of Ukraine.
