Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni called for increased international effort to combat human trafficking networks engaging in child sex slavery and other forms of human bondage during her address at the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday.
Meloni told international leaders gathered in New York that the United Nations “must do more” in confronting criminal networks who use illegal migration as a vehicle to proliferate modern forms of slavery, including the selling of children into sex slavery.
“The United Nations must do more, because these criminal organisations are re-proposing, in other forms, slavery – understood as the commodification of human beings – which this Assembly, in other times, played a fundamental role in definitively eradicating. There’s no going back,” the Italian leader said according to Italian broadcaster RAI.
The conservative prime minister said that “defeating the slavers of the Third Millennium is possible” if police forces, intelligence services, and judicial authorities come together in an international effort to use the “follow the money” formula innovated in Italy to go after the Sicilian Mafia in the 1980s by trailblazing judges such as Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.
Meloni said that Rome intends on sharing such know-how and methods used to confront traffickers in Africa with increased cooperation with other countries, notably in Latin America.
“There is a common thread that links organisations that speculate on human trafficking in Africa and those who manage drug trafficking in Latin America, or the abomination of those who kidnap children to make them sex slaves of unscrupulous rich men, depriving them of their present and their future,” she said.
While much focus in Western academia, media and politics is placed on historical instances of slavery, such as the Transatlantic Slave Trade, the pervasiveness of modern slavery is often overlooked.
According to the International Labor Organization, there were an estimated 49.6 million people globally in some form of modern slavery as of 2021, 12 million of whom are children. The ILO said that some 27.6 million people were in situations of forced labour, while around 22 million were in forced marriages, which international organisations recognise as a form of modern slavery.
The United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) has estimated that human trafficking earns criminal networks $150 billion industry. UNICEF has also found that human trafficking is the second-most profitable black market trade in the United States, only trailing behind the illicit drug trade.
The UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Violence Against Children said last year that child slaves generate $39 billion for human trafficking networks every year.
“Despite all the work that has been undertaken over the last two decades, trafficking in children continues to be a high-profit, low-risk crime, based upon the principles of supply and demand. Children are treated like commodities that are bought, sold, traded and used over and over again,” the UN body said.
In her address to the General Assembly on Tuesday, Prime Minister Meloni also highlighted her government’s policy of partnering with African nations on development projects to reduce the flow of illegal migrants across the Mediterranean, an often deadly journey managed by unscrupulous people smugglers and facilitated by pro-open borders NGOs.
Meloni said that Rome has developed strategic partnerships with nine African nations to facilitate the influx of investment and capital for projects to aid in energy development and food production in exchange for increased co-operation in confronting illegal migration.
“I want to reiterate once again, our objective, faced with tens of thousands of people facing desperate journeys to enter Europe illegally, is to guarantee first of all their right not to have to emigrate, not to have to cut off their roots simply because they have no other choice,” she explained.
Although the Italian PM had initially faced early criticism from populists for straying from the hardline tactics she campaigned on before coming into office, such as enacting a naval blockade of the Mediterranean Sea to stop boat migrants, her diplomatic approach has begun to bear some fruits.
According to Italian Interior Ministry figures released last month, Meloni’s government has driven down illegal migrant arrivals by 64 per cent over last year as deals with North African nations such as Libya and Tunisia to crack down on local people smuggling networks have come into effect.