Child Trafficking and the Limits of Legislation
Child trafficking, as defined by the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons (2000), is the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring, or receipt of anyone under the age of 18 for the purpose of exploitation with or without the consent of their parents/guardian. International recognition of child trafficking, as an egregious violation of children’s rights, dates back to the 1950 UN Convention on the abolition of slavery, slave trading, and related practices similar to slavery. Emanating from this commitment is the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), which enjoined State Parties to take the necessary national, bilateral, and multilateral steps to prevent the abduction of, the sale of, or the trafficking of children for any purpose or in any form. Following from this was Convention No. 182 of the International Labor Organization (ILO) in 1999 on the Worst Forms of Child Labor. Article 3(a) of the Convention called on member states to eliminate the sale and trafficking of children, including the forced or compulsory recruitment of children for use in armed conflict.
Given the high prevalence of child trafficking in Africa, there have been several continental, regional, and national legal frameworks designed to respond to the problem. For example, the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child (ACRWC) came into force in 1999. The preamble of the Charter mentions that due to their developmental needs, the child “requires particular care with regard to health, physical, mental, moral, and social development, and requires legal protection in conditions of freedom, dignity and security” (ACRWC 1999, p. 7). The wording of this section is indicative of the broader objectives of the Charter, which are to ensure that children are protected from every form of violation and are capable of truncating their physical, social, and emotional well-being. At any rate, the ACRWC became a rallying point for individual African states to enact protective legislation that forestalls violence against children.
According to the Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Violence against Children (2015), the constitution of 49 African countries provides for child’s right protection from violence, degrading treatment, and harmful practices, and 6 other African states (Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, South Africa, Sudan, Swaziland, and Uganda) constitutionally capture these rights as non-derogable. Beyond national constitutions, African countries have established other forms of regulations to deepen their commitment (real or imagined) towards the protection of children.
In instances such Cameroon’s Penal Code of 2016 (PRC 2016), Botswana’s Children’s Act of 2009 (ILO 2009), Tanzania’s Law of the Child Act of 2009 (Parliament of Tanzania 2009), Nigeria’s Child Rights Act of 2003 (PLAC 2003), Central African Republic’s Child Protection Code of 2020 (United Nations 2020), Gambia’s Children’s Act of 2005 (Citizenship Rights Africa 2006), Malawi’s Child Care, Protection and Justice Act, 2010 (Malawi Legal Information Institute 2014), The Republic of Sudan’s Child Act of 2010 (Citizenship Rights Africa 2010), Tunisia’s Child Protection Code of 1995 (WHO 1995),to mention a few, one observes the initiation of domestic laws to tackle child-related rights and protection. Since the majority of these regulations came in the wake of the ACRWC, one can infer that the Charter helped in animating African states towards creating new domestic laws to supplement the Charter. Beyond this, the ACRWC has served as a basis for resolving cases relating to child protection in domestic courts in countries such as Zimbabwe, Kenya, and Lesotho (Mezmur 2020).
Efforts have also been made to respond to human trafficking specifically as part of the broader security framework to prevent violence against children. At the regional level, countries within the ECOWAS adopted in 2011 a political declaration and an action plan against trafficking in human beings (UNIS 2001). Several bilateral agreements have also been enacted in instances where cross-border trafficking of children appears rife between countries. For example, the Malian and Ivory Coast governments embarked on bilateral agreements to end cross-border trafficking following a series of evidence-based reports by NGOs in Mali of the trafficking of Malian children who end up in the plantations of the Ivory Coast (UNICEF 2002). Similarly, Nigeria and Benin Republic signed, in 2006, the Cooperation Agreement to prevent, suppress, and punish trafficking in persons with emphasis on trafficking in women and children (UNICEF 2005). Three years prior to the agreement, Nigeria had set up the Nigerian National Trafficking in Persons Law Enforcement and Administration Act, which came into force in July 2003 and which criminalizes child trafficking with harsh punishment for offenders (Adepoju 2005).
In Ghana, the anti-trafficking policy, which was adapted from the Palermo Protocol, is codified in the Human Trafficking Act 2005 (Koomson et al. 2021). Observably, anti-trafficking legal frameworks for most African states have been in place for almost two decades. However, these broad and ever-growing legislative responses to the problem contrast sharply with the concerning statistics of child trafficking in Africa given implementation deficits. For example, a 2021 report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime found that children made up 75 percent of trafficking victims detected in West Africa (UNODC 2021). The report also suggests that there were 4799 victims detected across 26 Sub-African countries, and 2553 of them were children (UNODC 2021).
Galal (2023) submits that between 2013 and 2022, 41 percent of sex trafficking victims in West Africa were below 17 years. Among the factors that account for these worrying trends are poverty, civil unrest, armed conflict, and natural disasters (Koomson et al. 2021; Dottridge 2021; Dinbabo 2013; Mark 2012;). Interestingly, the nature of suffering trafficked children are forced to endure is often contingent on the country of destination. For countries such as Nigeria, Togo, Ivory Coast, Ghana, and Benin, children are trafficked predominantly for the purpose of child labor, domestic servitude, and alms begging (Okunade and Shulika 2021). In Mali, Senegal, Gambia, and Guinea-Bissau, they are mostly trafficked for street begging, prostitution, and child pornography (Okunade and Shulika 2021; Mbaku 2021). The action plan of the ECOWAS region, which involves an agreement to set up direct communication between their border control agencies and tackle human trafficking, appears ineffectual.
This situation is indicative of the lack of progress towards the protection of children in a region that is ostensibly a hotbed of child trafficking. The situation is no less concerning in East and Central African countries such as Congo-Brazzaville, Congo (DRC), Liberia, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Somalia, Burundi, and Sudan, where children have been used either as child soldiers or trafficked to mine diamonds in conflict-ridden localities (Fitzgibbon 2003). The implacable trend of child trafficking against the backdrop of extensive legislation signals that new conceptual interrogation of the menace is required in order to generate new ways of understanding the problem.
