Human Trafficking - A Never-Ending Story?

Abstract: World politics consists of different international organizations and transnational actors which operate alongside with states. This thesis describes how international organizations and transnational actors are organized and their influence on world politics. These actors need to cooperate with states in order to have an impact, but they are not only powerless actors in world politics. The purpose of this thesis is to determine how OSCE and ECPAT are fighting against human trafficking and what difficulties they encounter preventing trafficking. The OSCE is an international organization, which consists of 56 participating states; while ECPAT is a network, to which 80 groups from 70 countries belong. The OSCE is trying to affect its participating states` legislation and find common rules to convict traffickers. The ECPAT groups are trying to prevent child trafficking by influencing states. Their priority is to support victims of child trafficking and improve the situation by monitoring states and providing outside with data. Trafficking is a difficult issue to study as there is no exact number of victims, and researchers define the dimension of the problem differently. The legislation to pursue traffickers is not harmonized between states and accordingly, the reported numbers are difficult to compare.