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We can't keep ignoring human trafficking in war [1]

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Date: 2025-07 

Human trafficking has become such a common element of war that its appearance when a new conflict breaks out no longer shocks as it should. Horrific, yes. But like death and destruction, unfortunately expected.

From the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda, Boko Haram in Nigeria, and al-Shabaab in Somalia to ISIS in Syria and Iraq, combatants have deliberately used human trafficking to supply themselves with manpower and money. They have forced captives to work, children to fight, and families to pay ransom. They have also used human trafficking to reward their forces and terrorise communities, through practices like sexual slavery, forced marriage, and systematic rape of women and girls.

Not only rebels and warlords are guilty of trafficking during war. Manas Kongpan, a Thai army general, was convicted in 2017 for his role in trafficking Rohingya refugees. He was initially sentenced to 27 years, later increased to 82 years, for crimes including human trafficking and accepting bribes. NGOs document evidence of human trafficking in conflict, for example in December 2024, Human Rights Watch released a report detailing the abduction and sexual enslavement of women and girls by Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and allied militias in South Kordofan. Even those sent to protect the vulnerable have been implicated. Whistleblowers exposed human trafficking by UN staff and contractors in Bosnia in the mid-1990s, and peacekeeping forces in Somalia were documented to have sexually exploited local women between 2013-14. Beyond those fighting, organised crime groups also thrive, using the chaos and vulnerability created by war as an opportunity for trafficking.

Human trafficking is now so established in conflict that, when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, multiple awareness campaigns sprang up within days to warn governments and civil society that it was coming. Despite the warning, it happened anyway. It didn’t happen exactly how the anti-trafficking community thought it would – the scale was smaller and the prevailing form of human trafficking identified was forced labour not sexual exploitation, but it happened. There also formed a link between human trafficking and Russia’s recruitment of children to military schools such as Yunarmia and the involvement of minors within Russian armed forces and private military and security companies.

Despite our awareness and detailed documentations of trafficking in conflict, the international community of anti-trafficking actors and institutions remains largely ineffective at countering human trafficking in wartime. Neither the mainstream anti-trafficking establishment, with its domestic criminal justice responses, nor business and human rights approaches grounded in fair labour, nor the courts charged with enforcing international law and the laws of armed conflict, have managed to provide a viable response.

Yet they must. Human trafficking by combatants is a crime against humanity under international law – one of the most serious crimes there is. Tolerating it brings the whole concept of international justice into disrepute. It is essential that the international community maintains the norm that even in war some acts are unacceptable, and that justice will be served to anybody who transgresses war’s legal limits. That includes human trafficking.

Accountability: law on the books vs. law in action

International justice is one of the main mechanisms the global community has for keeping the worst crimes in check. It exists to hold people who commit atrocities to account, and to induce individuals who are about to commit atrocities to reconsider their course.

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[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/beyond-trafficking-and-slavery/we-cant-keep-ignoring-human-trafficking-in-war/

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