Collaboration
Enhancing collaboration within and across sectors
Improving justice outcomes for trafficked and exploited persons requires strong coordination and collaboration across borders and sectors, and within national and local levels.
A lack of cooperation between relevant stakeholders has been identified as barrier to more effective counter-trafficking.
To ensure justice for victims, law enforcement, prosecutors and victim service providers, all need to work together to ensure a rights-based response and justice against traffickers.
This project aims to support ASEAN and ASEAN Member States with exchange and cooperation initiatives, such as policy dialogues, to progress multi-stakeholder approaches to countering-trafficking.
Research on trafficking into online scam centres and forced criminality
ASEAN-ACT is collaborating with the Global Initiative against Transnational Organised Crime and the Bali Process Regional Support Office to research these patterns, together with civil society and other actors with in-depth knowledge of these trends. While ASEAN-ACT continues to support ASEAN Member States respond to the range of human trafficking patterns they experience, these new trends are challenging traditional counter-trafficking responses. Despite the scale, few victims being officially identified as such, and few perpetrators facing justice.
Collaboration between government, NGO and private sector on recruitment and employment standards for migrant workers
Trafficking in persons is often discussed in isolation from the spectrum of labour abuse and exploitation that occurs in workplaces around the world. However, a growing number of countries, including Thailand, are considering how to prevent and respond to a broader range of slavery-like conditions that have significant human, environmental, social and economic costs.
How are we contributing to responses to the issue of trafficking into online scam operations in Southeast Asia?
A new form of human trafficking has rapidly taken shape in the ASEAN region. Since 2021, people have been recruited from overseas into ‘online jobs’ in numerous countries in the region. On arrival however, they have been taken to compounds and forced to engage in online scams, and abused psychologically and physically if resisting.
We are working with partners in the ASEAN region to build the evidence, facilitate dialogue, and strengthen cooperation and policy.
Implementing the non-punishment principle: practical guidance for ASEAN Member States
Developed collaboratively by the ASEAN Senior Officials Meeting on Transnational Crime (SOMTC) and the ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights (AICHR), and supported by the ASEAN-Australia Counter Trafficking program, a new Guideline reflects ASEAN’s commitment to a victim-centered, rights-based approach to combating trafficking.