State Department Highlights Efforts to Combat Human Trafficking, Continued Challenges in New Report

Secretary of State Antony Blinken speaks during a press conference in Rio de Janeiro on Feb. 22, 2024. Pablo Porciuncula/AFP via Getty Images

The U.S. State Department marked 13 countries as the worst at protecting against human trafficking in its 2024 Trafficking in Persons Report, which it released on Monday.

“The 2024 Trafficking in Human Persons Report is a comprehensive, objective assessment of the state of anti-trafficking efforts across 188 countries and territories, including the United States,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said at a June 24 event unveiling the new report.

“For more than two decades, this report has documented emerging trends, highlighted areas of progress and setback, and identified effective initiatives combatting human trafficking.”

The State Department produces their human trafficking report each year to track global compliance with the counter-human trafficking standards set out in the 2000 Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA). The report scores countries by their adherence to these TVPA standards and efforts to improve compliance.

Tier 1 countries in the report are those whose governments fully meet the minimum TVPA standards.

Tier 2 countries are those that fall short of the minimum TVPA standards, but which the State Department assesses “are making significant efforts to bring themselves into compliance with those standards.” Tier 2 also includes a Tier 2 Watch List for countries that miss the TVPA minimum standards and which the State Department assesses to have a significant or growing number of trafficking victims or that are failing to provide sufficient evidence of their efforts to combat such human trafficking.

Tier 3 countries are those whose governments are falling short of the minimum TVPA standards that the State Department does not assess to be making significant efforts to improve.

Among the emerging human trafficking trends identified in the report, Mr. Blinken noted a particular growth in schemes targeting victims online, often in social media, gaming, and dating applications. He gave the following example.

“Traffickers used fake job listings to lure individuals away from their homes with the promise of well-paying jobs. Instead, they were taken to an isolated, guarded compound in Burma, where their phones were confiscated,” Mr. Blinken said. “There, captives were forced to swindle people online, including American citizens—swindling them into investing in fake cryptocurrencies, typically through romance scams.”

Cindy Dyer, the U.S. Ambassador-at-Large to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, said where Southeast Asia had previously been a hub for these kinds of online forced labor scams, this year’s report notes similar emerging patterns in South America, Europe, South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa.

Tier 3 Countries

Speaking at a State Department press briefing on Monday, Ms. Dyer said five countries previously in the Tier 3 list had made improvements and were upgraded in the State Department’s TVPA compliance scoring methodology since 2023. Those countries were Algeria, Curacoa, Chad, Equatorial Guinea, and Guinea Bissau.

Still, Ms. Dyer said 19 countries and territories remained in the Tier 3 list for at least a second year in a row: Afghanistan, Brunei, Burma, Cambodia, the People’s Republic of China and the territory of Macau, Cuba, Djibouti, Eritrea, Iran, Nicaragua, North Korea, Papua New Guinea, Russia, Sint Maarten, South Sudan, Syria, Turkmenistan, and Venezuela.

Brunei was downgraded from the Tier 2 watchlist to Tier 3 this year. Sudan also joined the Tier 3 list for the first time, after what Ms. Dyer described as a “double downgrade” that dropped the northeast African country from Tier 2, past the Tier 2 watchlist and into the State Department’s lowest category on its human trafficking scoring system since 2023.

Belarus also returned to the Tier 3 list, after rising out of that category between the Department’s 2020 and 2021 reports.

Protesters hold a sign against China's Uyghur camps, labeled vocational training centers by the Chinese regime, outside the home of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou before her extradition hearing at B.C. Supreme Court in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, on Jan. 20, 2020. Lindsey Wasson/Reuters

In China, Ms. Dyer said the State Department remains particularly concerned about forced labor programs targeting the Tibetan population, as well as so-called labor transfers in the Xinjiang region impacting the Uyghur population. The latest report also included a special issues section focusing on allegations of forced organ harvesting within China.

“Forced organ harvesting in China appears to be targeting specific ethnic, linguistic, or religious minorities held in detention, often without being explained the reasons for arrest or given arrest warrants, at different locations,” the report reads. “We are deeply concerned by reports of discriminatory treatment of the prisoners or detainees based on their ethnicity and religion or belief.”

Ms. Dyer said Russia’s ongoing military campaign in Ukraine has also exacerbated human trafficking concerns as the war has led many women and children to flee the country and expose themselves to greater risks of exploitation. She also pointed to allegations of schemes to recruit foreign nationals to fight for Russia.

“Reports do indicate that Russian authorities, middlemen private military companies, and Russian affiliated forces are using coercion and deception and potentially force to recruit foreign nationals,” she said.

Ms. Dyer said 17 other countries were downgraded from Tier 2 to the Tier 2 Watch List in this year’s report.

Vietnam Upgrade Raises Questions

This year’s Trafficking in Persons report saw Vietnam upgrade for the second year in a row, with the country moving up from Tier 3 to the Tier 2 Watch List in the 2023 report, and now to Tier 2 in this year’s iteration of the report.

This upgrade met with some scrutiny from members of the press. A human rights advocacy group known as Project 88 claimed last week that it had shared new trafficking allegations concerning Vietnam with the U.S. State Department, including claims the Vietnamese government covered up claims its government officials were involved in a human trafficking ring in Saudi Arabia.

Russia's President Vladimir Putin participates in a welcome ceremony hosted by Vietnam's President To Lam, at the Presidential Palace in Hanoi, Vietnam, on June 20, 2024. Sputnik/Gavriil Grigorov/Pool via REUTERS

Asked whether the State Department had looked into Project 88’s claims, Ms. Dyer said her team was aware of the allegations but insisted that Vietnam either had to be upgraded or downgraded from the Tier 2 Watch List and that an upgrade appeared to be more appropriate than a downgrade, despite the new allegations raised by Project 88.

“Vietnam was a country that could not stay on Tier 2 Watch List so it had to go to Tier 2 or go down to Tier 3. Those are the two options given the TVPA mandate,” Ms. Dyer said.

Ms. Dyer said the State Department’s annual Trafficking in Persons report takes numerous factors into account when deciding where to rank countries on their TVPA compliance.

“In the case of Vietnam, we determined that it was more appropriate for them to go to Tier 2. And I think some of the reasons that we determined that was ...  from increasing investigations, prosecutions, and convictions for suspected trafficking crimes, but we also had an increased number of identifications and assistance provided to victims.”