The announcement is official: Ivanka Trump plans the White House Summit on human trafficking, considered as a world empowerment to break silence.

Human trafficking is the trade of humans for the purpose of forced labour, sexual slavery, or commercial sexual exploitation for the trafficker or others. This may encompass providing a spouse in the context of forced marriage, or the extraction of organs or tissues, including for surrogacy and ova removal. Human trafficking can occur within a country or trans-nationally. Human trafficking is a crime against the person because of the violation of the victim’s rights of movement through coercion and because of their commercial exploitation.
At big scale, human trafficking is a mass crime.
When done for racist purposes, human trafficking is a genocide.

In this context, the United Nations are concerned, as the UNSDG implies the points:

• 1 – no poverty
• 2 – zero hunger
• 3  – good health and well-being
• 5 – gender equality
• 8 – decent work and economic growth
• 10 – reduced inequalities
• 11 – responsible production and consumption
• 16 – peace, justice and strong institutions
• 17 – global partnerships
• 18 – rescue for future

Globally speaking, human trafficking is a system that goes against all laws and the UNSDG.

At its scale of Research Institute specialized in sustainable development, the IMEDD is concerned by this issue as it is a direct attack against human rights and the three pillars of sustainable development (economy, social and environment). Human trafficking indeed avoids the good realization of the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
When we look in the numbers, human trafficking and its derived activities represent 8% of the total world trade, meaning that it has become a dark economy of weight.

Behind human trafficking, there are many other issues: drugs traffic, weapons traffic, slavery, illegal sales of organs, sex abuse, obligation of murdering people, hostages. All these activities contribute to the financing of terrorism.

In the past years, with the big world currents of immigration, the issue of human trafficking and all its derived activities have been carried to the United Nations. In Europe, since the year 2011 (so a duration of 9 years), many migrants arrived on the shores of Italy. They were only looking for a better life for their future and most of them also wanted to meet freedom for the first time.

In the year 2016, the IMEDD was working for Europe and the United Nations especially in the field of smart cities and sustainable mobility. Through, the conferences, the interviews realized, documentation on the Internet, etc…, we were informed that human trafficking occurred in Italy, that a mass crime was occurring with the migrants and that the Italian Authorities had opened two investigations. At this time, the first obvious element was drug traffic, that led the United Nations to investigate too. They discover a trade channel of drugs mostly led in Afghanistan, with the poppies, the flower that serves to create heroin (the main alkaloid taken from the opium poppy).
Opium report: https://bit.ly/36WLAbi
The complete survey on opium: https://bit.ly/2Rhz7YZ

Several other researches were led by Amnesty International that showed that behind the drugs traffic existed the human trafficking. On the Internet, many interviews were posted by the African migrants that arrived in Europe who explained some terrible stories.

• Story 1 from the African survivors:
  “Most of the migrants who wanted to join Europe used a plaform country to cross the Mediterranean Sea, Lybia. 
  Many of them said that there, they were sold by the traffickers as slaves and they were sent to forced work. The most lucky people could escape. They said that when they were ill in Lybia, they were sent to clinics. They were anesthesied (or not) and their organs were removed. When they woke up after the anesthesy, they discovered a big scar on their body and understood what had happened. Their organs were taken away to be sold on a black market for those in need”.

• Story 2 from the African survivors:
  “The migrants who reached Europe finally thought they had reached safety, but it happened that with the rules of immigration in Europe, many of them were sent back to Lybia, with a lethal fate”.
  

• Story 3 from the African women survivors:
  “The women said they were raped, beaten, locked up and mistreated. Their husband were killed and their children taken away so they could be educated to terrorism behaviors”.
  

• Story 4 from the African survivors:
  “The migrants said that there was an international network of traffickers, in Africa first and in Europe too. There, in Europe, the traffickers sold again the migrants or made them commit atrocities by force. It was about putting still alive people or dead bodies into mass graves (pits). If they refused, they had the legs broken or the throat trenched.”

• Story 5 from the African survivors:
  “The migrants said that an epuration was made on them by the traffickers in Lybia and in Europe. They said that they left proofs hidden on the territories and that they talked to people of trust, so their awful story can be solved in future, so their mothers and wives know the truth”.

• Story 6 from the African survivors:
  “The migrants said that on 15 boats of migrants, only 7 arrived safely in Italy. The other 8 boats sank in the sea and the people drowned as they didn’t know how to swim. Some survivors said that the dead bodies of the sea were caught by private boats in the international waters, on which the removal of organs on dead people was done”.

Globally, the crisis of the African migrants is not finished and the world now faces many big issues considering the terrible facts, the threats in terms of security and the human duty for all these victims (the deads and the survivors), that implies to take strong responsibility, mostly by breaking the silence on this tragic story and recognize the awful slaughter as mentioned in this article that talks about cannibalism and human trafficking, still in May 2019.

Here is below a video of a young African man in 2016 who sent a call to his friends in Africa, telling them not to go to Lybia and renounce to  the European dream.

Lybia was actually not the only country that was a platform for human trafficking. Morocco helped as shown in the testimony of this woman from Congo whose trust was abused by her boyfriend who asked her to go to Morocco. She was happy in Congo and had a good life and job. She left everything and followed her boyfriend. In Morocco, she lost everything and she was even very badly mistreated, as she explains in the video below.

Behind all these terrible testimonies, there is a reality of facts. This human trafficking was carefully organized otherwise, it wouldn’t have been possible to develop it at the such a big scale. It shows as well that more than the two countries in cause (some traffickers in Lybia and Morocco), they received support from people in Europe, who after the entry of the migrants, sold them to the traffickers channels for slavery, sex abuse, organs trafficking, illegal commerce… For human trafficking, several activities were therfore needed: transports, clinics, restaurants, places to sleep, commerce (counterfeigting), security, drugs and weapons traffic, waste treatments, construction (for the mass graves) and money laundering.
If we consider the number of migrants who illegally entered Europe since 2011 and the risks that was a weight on their heads (being caught by the European police and sent back to the hell of Lybia), certainly that many migrants thought at first sight that being caught in Europe in the dirty channels of trade wouldn’t be as worse as it was in Lybia.
Even though those criminal enterprises can be identified as a channel by the Police Force, a French magistrate explains that regarding the money laundering, nothing is more easy for the criminals, and that the states remain in a global incapacity of action, underlining the fact that if the financing flows can’t be stopped for the dark economies, they will increase in time.

On the 31st of January, Ivanka Trump  will organize at the White House the summit on human trafficking.
There in America, the situation is quite the same. What changes is the origin of the drugs traffic.
With the Heroin, it’s Afghanistan. With the cocain, it’s Colombia.
The upcoming years will be very difficult for the world community to deal with these issues as we don’t face a unique crime but a mass crime or even a genocide. At this stage, the only thing to do is pay a duty of memory to all the victims of human trafficking and spread the word.