Watch our video presentation to find out more about the human trafficking case law database:

Human trafficking is a truly global phenomenon and a crime which affects nearly every part of the world, whether as a source, transit or destination country. According to UNODC, victims from at least 127 countries have been detected and it is estimated that more than 2.4 million people are exploited by criminals at any given time.

More than a decade after the adoption of the Trafficking in Persons Protocol, most countries have criminalized most forms of human trafficking in their legislation. However, the use of these laws to prosecute and convict traffickers remains limited. In the 2009 Global Report on Trafficking in Persons, for instance, two out of every five countries covered in the report had never recorded a single conviction for trafficking offences.

An added issue behind the legal aspects of human trafficking is a lack of knowledge and understanding on the global stage. In those cases where prosecutions have been undertaken, very little is currently known about them internationally. This often leaves questions open such as how do practitioners use the respective laws and what - if any - are the characteristics of successful prosecutions?

To help answer these questions, UNODC has developed a human trafficking case law database to provide immediate, public access to officially documented instances of this crime. The database contains details on victims' and perpetrators' nationalities, trafficking routes, verdicts and other information related to prosecuted cases from across the world. In doing so, it provides not only mere statistics on numbers of prosecutions and convictions, but also the real-life stories of trafficked persons as documented by the courts. The database aims to assist judges, prosecutors, policy-makers, media researchers and other interested parties by making available details of real cases with examples of how the respective national laws in place can be used to prosecute human trafficking. Since its launch, almost 1,000 selected cases from over 80 countries and two supranational courts have been uploaded.

By creating the database, UNODC is working to increase the visibility of successful prosecutions and at the same time promote awareness of the realities of this devastating crime. Such a database of human trafficking cases enables users to take experiences and court decisions from other countries into account when dealing with human trafficking issues, consult on practices in different jurisdictions and broaden their knowledge of human trafficking crimes.