For those of you wanting a fast, but throughout analysis of the problem of human trafficking globally, the 2010 Trafficking in Persons Report is the most comprehensive worldwide report on the efforts of governments to combat severe forms of trafficking in persons. Its findings seek to raise global awareness and spur countries to take effective actions to counter trafficking in persons. The 2010 “TIP” Report covers 177 countries. Our target country of Costa Rica remained a Tier 2 country, meaning that it failed to meet the minimum standards to address trafficking, With respect to the areas of prosecution and protection, areas where Operation Liberate is focused, the report said the following:
“During the past year, the Government of Costa Rica continued to raise public awareness about human trafficking and trained many government officials, in addition to maintaining limited victim services. However, the government’s law enforcement efforts lagged with respect to holding trafficking offenders accountable for their crimes and in adequately addressing domestic cases of human trafficking.”
The entire 2010 Report can be found at www.state.gov/g/tip/rls/tiprpt/2010/ - Cached.
For those seeking a more academic view of the subject, there is perhaps no better resource than The Protection Project, a human trafficking “think tank” working out of Johns Hopkins University in Washington, DC. They have an entire library of resources and publications that they have produced, including analyses of the State Department’s TIP Reports and their own country reports in this area, which take a slightly different perspective than the TIP Reports. These can be found at http://www.protectionproject.org/?q=content/resources.
The United Nations Office of Drugs and Organized Crime produces a number of analytical resources and excellent online training tools dealing with various aspects of trafficking. We use many of these tools in our internal team training. They can be found at http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/human-trafficking/publications.html.
At the cutting edge of human rights research, the International Human Rights Law Institute at DePaul University Law School produces a number of scholarly publications on human trafficking. Many of those works to date have focused on the human trafficking problem in Latin America and the Caribbean. They may be found at http://www.law.depaul.edu/centers_institutes/ihrli/publications/.