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This week we released the 2022 Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report, which is meant to effect positive change and encourage governments to increase and improve their anti-trafficking efforts each year. You can read the remarks I gave at the 2022 TIP Report Launch Ceremony, alongside the Acting Director of the Office of Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, Kari Johnstone, and the 2022 Trafficking in Persons Heroes.
Today, we’re releasing the 2022 Trafficking in Persons Report. It assesses how 188 countries and territories, including the United States, are performing in terms of preventing trafficking, protecting victims, and prosecuting traffickers. It is one of the most comprehensive sources of information anywhere on anti-trafficking efforts by governments – what works, what doesn’t, and how we can continue to do better.
None of this would be possible without the extraordinary efforts of many people, starting with the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, under Kari’s remarkable leadership. I’d like to thank her for everything she and her team are doing every single year, but also the many diplomats, journalists, advocates, academics, and especially survivors who contribute to our understanding of this terrible crime.
Thank you to our colleagues across Congress. We’re grateful for the partnership that we have with Congress on combatting trafficking.
Thank you, too, to members of the U.S. Advisory Council on Human Trafficking and on the Human Trafficking Expert Consultant Network. These are two platforms that make it possible for us to work directly with survivors to shape more effective anti-trafficking policies.
And finally, again, thank you to our six 2022 TIP Report Heroes. Five are here with us in person, as Kari said, and we’ll honor them later this afternoon. So I’d just like to mention the one hero who’s not actually with us today, for obvious reasons. Let me just say a few words.
Kahtehrynah Chehrehpahkha leads the Ukrainian chapter of the anti-trafficking NGO La Strada. As we all know, since the start of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, millions of Ukrainians have had to flee their homes – some internally within Ukraine, some leaving the country altogether – many, most with just what they were able to carry – and that makes them highly vulnerable to exploitation. La Strada has a hotline. It’s received an unprecedented number of calls over the past five months. The organization has given literally thousands of Ukrainians the information and assistance that they need to try to stay safe as they’re forced from their homes.
Kahtehrynah – and all of our TIP Heroes – are making a huge difference in the lives of people around the world.
I think most of you know this, but it’s worth repeating: The scale of this problem is vast. There are nearly 25 million people currently victims of trafficking. The United States is committed to fighting it because trafficking destabilizes societies, it undermines economies, it harms workers, it enriches those who exploit them, it undercuts legitimate business, and most fundamentally, because it is so profoundly wrong.
Trafficking in persons violates the rights of all people to be free: free to do what you want, be who you want, make the life that you wish.
Earlier this year, I had an opportunity to chair the first meeting of President Biden’s Interagency Task Force to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons. We brought together 20 agencies across our government to talk about how to implement the National Action Plan that the President released last November. This is a three-year strategy that includes strengthening prosecutions of traffickers, enhancing victim protection, and preventing the crime from occurring within our borders and abroad.
This report is a key part of our strategy. It’s something that we do every year, and as I said, a huge amount of work goes into actually bringing it to fruition.
So here’s where we are. I think if you look at the report, you’re going to see a mixed picture of progress. Twenty-one countries were upgraded a tier, because those governments made significant, increasing efforts to combat trafficking at home as well as for their citizens abroad. Eighteen countries were downgraded a tier, indicating that they either didn’t make significant, increasing efforts to combat trafficking – or worse, that their governments have a state-sponsored policy or pattern of trafficking.
As the report details, corruption continues to be a top tool of traffickers. Complicit government officials may turn a blind eye to illicit activities, provide false documents for workers, tip off traffickers to impending raids. Corruption allows traffickers to continue to act with impunity.
Meanwhile, in 11 countries, the government subjects its own people to trafficking – for example, as retaliation for political expression or through forced labor on projects of national interest.
That can look like subjecting people, including children, to forced labor in key sectors – mining, logging, manufacturing, farming – or sending members of ethnic minority groups to be “deradicalized” in camps.
It can also mean deploying workers around the world without telling them where they’re going or what they’ll be doing, confiscating passports and salaries, forcing them into dangerous work conditions, and constantly monitoring their movements.
That’s what happened to Zhang Qiang, a Chinese laborer who signed onto a Belt and Road project in Indonesia last year. He was drawn by the higher pay, which he promised his daughter would be used to buy her a bed. But when he arrived in Indonesia, he was stripped of his passport, instructed to sign a contract for a longer duration and lower pay than he’d been promised. Armed guards patrolled the workers’ camp, making escape virtually impossible. After failing to get help from the Chinese embassy in Jakarta, he managed to board a boat to escape Indonesia via Malaysia, but then was apprehended by Malaysian authorities. By the last reporting, he was on track to be deported back to China.
Another challenge that you’ll see laid out in this year’s report is the climate crisis and the instability that it helps accelerate and create. As we’re seeing in our hemisphere, climate is a key driver of mass migration, which can create, alas, ideal conditions for traffickers. And according to the UN Environment Programme, natural disasters – as well as the loss of livelihoods that they produce – may increase trafficking by up to 30 percent.
Even the higher demand for clean energy can have unintended consequences.
Consider, for example, the Democratic Republic of Congo, home to much of the world’s cobalt, which is a critical component for lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles – something very important for our efforts to combat climate change. Some of that cobalt is mined by children, who are then pushed into work through coercion, through fraud, through force.
I make this point because we need to be aware that as we tackle issues like climate and corruption throughout our – through our diplomacy, we also have to address how they intersect with trafficking in persons. Traffickers seize every opportunity to exploit victims for profit. We’ve got to be just as determined – in fact, more determined and more creative – to stop them.
Now, the report also identifies several interventions that are making anti-trafficking efforts more effective. And one is this year’s theme: more survivor engagement.
Survivors of human trafficking know – through deeply painful experience – the tactics that traffickers use, the obstacles that survivors face as they get free, the support that can help the most as they work to rebuild their lives. So what the report emphasizes and what I want to emphasize the need for us to listen – listen to them, empower them, partner with them at every level of our work.
We’re seeing more organizations around the world ask survivors to serve as advisors – for example, the Albanian Coalition of Shelters for Victims of Trafficking, which provides victims and survivors with safe housing. They helped create an advisory board of survivors to make sure that their interventions are designed to actually fit the real-world needs of the populations that they’re serving.
Our own United States Advisory Council on Human Trafficking is comprised entirely of survivors who make recommendations on federal anti-trafficking policies to the President’s interagency task force.
Another important tool is better data collection, making sure that our practices and bringing this together to help track cases, to help allocate resources, to measure the effectiveness of anti-trafficking policies. And so we’re focusing on that.
In the Philippines, to cite one example, the government launched a technology platform so that multiple agencies can work together to manage cases of victims as well as prosecute their traffickers.
In Uganda, the government partnered with two NGOs to launch the Trafficking in Persons mobile app platform. That helps investigators share details of cases they’re working on. That helps bring more traffickers to justice.
These examples highlight the kind of information-sharing and partnership that we believe will bring us closer to our goal of a world that is free from human trafficking in all of its forms. And that’s precisely the kind of information-sharing and partnership we hope this year’s TIP Report will spur for governments as well as for advocates around the world.
Traffickers don’t respect borders. The harm caused by this crime is vast; it’s varied. And it will continue to take relentless diplomacy, coordination, advocacy, and commitment, which is in this room and on this stage, if we’re going to stop it.
I appreciate those who have taken the time to write to me in the past several months. To share your thoughts – please write to me and my team at EmailTeam@State.gov.
Sincerely,
 Secretary Antony J. Blinken
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