Human Trafficking and the Palermo Protocol – Does Ratification Have Any Effect on Anti-Trafficking Efforts and the Prevalence of Victims?

Sammanfattning: Human trafficking is not only an offence in the eyes of the law, but a violation of human rights. The Palermo Protocol is the most widespread international legislation, and 178 countries are state parties to the treaty. The purpose of this dissertation is to investigate whether ratification of the Protocol has any effect on countries’ anti-trafficking efforts and/or the rate of victims per 100.000 citizens. This is done by regressions on data on the 3P index, evaluating performance in the aspects prosecution, prevention and protection, from 190 countries during 2000-2015, and data covering victims from 33 countries during 2002-2019, with ratification as the explanatory variable. Country fixed effects, time fixed effects and clustered standard errors on a country level are applied to eliminate the endogeneity problem. The results on the 3P index data indicated that prevention is the area where efforts increased the most upon ratification. The regressions on the data covering victims did not show any statistical significance, hence no conclusions could be made about how ratification impacts prevalence of human trafficking.