Topic 1: Trafficking of Minors
Country: The Republic of Mozambique
Committee: United Nation Commission on Human Rights
School: Skyview High School
Name: Pavan Vaswani

The trafficking of minors in order to economically and sexually exploit them is a gross violation of Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the United Nations Charter on Children’s Rights, but UNICEF has found that over 1.2 million children are traded worldwide. International trafficking has been found to be pervasive throughout Southern Africa by the International Organization for Migration. According to Interpol, trafficking for the sake of cheap labor and sexual purposes has increased in southern Africa, especially in the state of South Africa due to a ready market created by strong economy for children for both purposes. Joint operations between police forces of adjacent countries have been shown to be successful in reducing the crime, however the problem is still great in the region. Children from the ages of seven to twelve are sometimes given to international child traffickers by parents, deluded by descriptions of pleasant work and great potential for monetary gains. The lives and futures of children depend on action taken by the United Nations to reduce child trafficking and put an end to the terrible conditions to which they are subjected.

Despite the illegality of prostitution in Mozambique, eighty-four percent of girls who live on the street  in our capital are involved in prostitution, according to a report by Ending Child Prostitution, Pornography, and Trafficking (ECPAT) International. Child slave rings operate out of our Republic, according to a study by UNICEF. The high AIDS mortality rate also guarantee’s an abundance of orphans, who are frequently exploited by slave traders for cheap labor. Children from Mozambique are most often taken by child slave traders to South Africa for work, or shipped overseas to China and Russia for sexual exploitation and for cheap labor. Interpol and Southern African Development Community immigration authorities have met to develop strategies to tackle this trade. The Republic’s poor economic conditions, despite current recovery, from inflation and high AIDS and poverty rates make it difficult to combat the problem without aid. Laws have been passed against such illegal and immoral practices, and the Republic has ratified the International Labor Organization (ILO) Convention (105) on the Abolition of Forced Labor and has signed the United Nations (UN) Protocol to Prevent, Suppress, and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children. However, the problem is still of great concern.

Joint efforts between states to combat child trafficking by finding and arresting child traffickers have been effective in the past. Therefore, an effective way to curb this problem would to be connect states and regions in which trafficking is a problem. Initiation of joint efforts between states, and the aiding of these efforts, will be efficient in combating the problem. The Southern African Counter-Trafficking Assistance Programme (SACTAP) covers many states in the southern African region. Financial aid could be given to this organization or actions conducted jointly with SACTAP so as to most effectively reduce this pervasive problem in the region. Other organizations that aid in the reduction of child trafficking around the world and the countries and regions in which this is a problem can be connected in order to conduct a joint effort to reduce the trafficking of minors as a multi-agency group. This will also facilitate the communication of effective techniques of combating the problem.