Trafficking vs. Smuggling
What’s the difference between trafficking and smuggling?
Trafficking is defined by the Palermo Convention (click here for our summary of Palermo) as “the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation."
Smuggling is the “procurement for financial or other material benefit of illegal entry of a person into a State of which that person is not a national or resident.”
There are three major considerations to help distinguish between trafficking and smuggling (taken from UNODC):
1) Consent
The smuggling of migrants, while often undertaken in dangerous or degrading conditions, involves migrants who have consented to the smuggling. Trafficking victims, on the other hand, have either never consented or, if they initially consented, that consent has been rendered meaningless by the coercive, deceptive or abusive actions of the traffickers.
2) Exploitation
Smuggling ends with the migrants' arrival at their destination, whereas trafficking involves the ongoing exploitation of the victim in some manner to generate illicit profits for the traffickers. From a practical standpoint, victims of trafficking also tend to be affected more severely and to be in greater need of protection from revictimization and other forms of further abuse than are smuggled migrants.
3) Transnationality
Smuggling is always transnational, whereas trafficking may not be. Trafficking can occur regardless of whether victims are taken to another State or only moved from one place to another within the same State.
LIFT is focused on assisting victims and survivors of exploitation, so, as you can tell from the definitions above, our work focuses on partnering with government agencies (law enforcement and public prosecutors) and NGOs addressing the crime of trafficking. In some of our cases, there may be a legal question as to whether trafficking or smuggling took place, and the courts decide the difference. We believe that if a case appears to be trafficking, if consent and exploitation are at all in question, that the case deserves to be investigated thoroughly by law enforcement authorities.
We found this chart from Stop the Traffik to be helpful in further explaining and summarizing the differences between the two:
