© United Nations 2021
The Toolkit is a collection of tools to help practitioners understand and incorporate human rights-based and gender equal responses into criminal justice responses to smuggling of migrants and trafficking in persons.
The focus of the toolkit is on criminal justice responses because UNODC - being the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime - is mandated to address the criminal dimensions of human trafficking and migrant smuggling, in the context the United Nations Transnational Organized Crime Convention (UNTOC) and the Protocols on Trafficking in Persons and Smuggling of Migrants supplementing it. This is not to suggest that criminal justice measures are the only responses required to confront these two crimes. UNODC fully recognizes that criminal justice responses alone cannot effectively combat trafficking in persons and smuggling of migrants, and understands that its efforts to address the transnational organized crime dimensions are only one part of a wider, comprehensive response that must be brought to bear in addressing the economic, social, cultural, civil and political dimensions of these crimes.
The target audience of the Toolkit is primarily UNODC staff, experts and stakeholders working in GLO.ACT partner countries to prevent and address trafficking in persons and migrant smuggling. Given this context, some of the issues raised in this Toolkit may not be as relevant in other regions. However, in the spirit of collaboration and engaging with partners across disciplines, the decision has been taken to make this Toolkit publically available for a secondary audience of actors outside of UNODC and beyond GLO.ACT partner countries, in case others may derive some benefit from these Tools in their own efforts to apply human rights based and gender equal approaches to human trafficking and migrant smuggling response. Stakeholders are welcome to use, amend or adapt Toolkit content to their purposes in line with their objectives to the extent that it is useful, or disregard if it is not.
