About IOM and Counter Trafficking
Since the mid-1990s, IOM and its partners have provided protection and assistance to close to 100,000 men, women and children, who were trafficked for sexual and labour exploitation, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude, or for organ removal. Agriculture, fishing, domestic work and hospitality, commercial sexual exploitation, pornography, begging, construction and manufacturing are some of the sectors in which victims were exploited.
IOM aims to support governments, civil society organizations, international organizations, and the private sector to combat human trafficking. This includes support to strengthen policies and procedures to facilitate the identification, referral, and protection and assistance of trafficked persons; improvements to anti-trafficking legislation and regulations and their implementation; and advisory services to private sector entities aiming to eliminate exploitation from their operations and supply chains. This includes actions to promote the ethical recruitment of migrant workers, for example through IOM’s International Recruitment Integrity System (IRIS), which is a due diligence tool for businesses, governments and workers. IOM encourages the entire international community to engage in the fight against trafficking. It does so by participating in, and leading, a number of regional and international multilateral processes, including the Inter-Agency Coordination Group against Trafficking in Persons (ICAT), and Alliance 8.7.
About IOM and Counter Trafficking in Emergencies
IOM carries out crisis response operations on a global scale, to address the most urgent needs of affected populations, and is an integral member of Humanitarian Country Teams, co-lead and member to numerous humanitarian clusters, and implements front-line services. IOM also works within the humanitarian community to mitigate the risk of trafficking and address these protection needs from the early stages of humanitarian response. As part of its ever-expending efforts in CT in humanitarian settings, IOM builds the capacity of humanitarian stakeholders through trainings, coordination among multi-sector working groups and clusters, and development of context-specific tools. IOM remains one of the leading operational agencies in the field in counter trafficking interventions and supporting victims identified in humanitarian settings.