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Ben

KLEPTOCRACY AC (TOC PRELIMS)


Because submission reclaims power back from the kleptocrats, I affirm.

[Resolved: The United States ought to submit to the jurisdiction of an international court designed to prosecute crimes against humanity.]
I accept the definition of crimes against humanity provided by the Rome Statute.
Professor Sonja Starr explains that grand corruption, or kleptocracy, is a crime against humanity under the “other inhumane acts” portion of the Rome Statute:

The worst acts of grand corruption share significant similarities with other listed acts. Like all of the listed acts, they are gross violations of fundamental human rights. n214 Like murder and extermination, [kleptocracy] they kill[s] people, often in large numbers. n215 Like deportation, forcible transfer, and economic persecution, they [it] inflict[s] severe deprivation affecting the fundamental conditions of life. Like apartheid, kleptocracy is a governmental regime that systematically oppresses part of the population in order to benefit those imposing the system. Moreover, no categorical dissimilarity [Nothing] distinguishes grand corruption from all of the other acts.

The best example of “an international court” is the ICC because it is the only available empirical analog that adheres to the resolution since it is the only one explicitly designed to prosecute crimes against humanity while using the term “court”; [Second, the structure and content of international law is uniquely malleable because this is a relatively new field, so the nature of international courts can only be determined by the most recent structures – since 2002, the International Criminal Court has been the most prominent focus of academic debate and international efforts alike, so it is the best representation of the hypothetical.]

Thus, the jurisdiction in context is complementary jurisdiction, [meaning that the court only steps in when national governments refuse to stop crimes against humanity or are unable to do so, so prosecution occurs after the failures of pure sovereignty]. However, since the resolution constrains the substantive purpose of prosecution to crimes against humanity, the question is whether the United States should submit to the limited jurisdiction over these crimes only.

To submit is defined by the American Heritage Dictionary as “to yield or surrender (oneself) to the will or authority of another,” so contextually means that the United States would invoke a legal shift to permit the court’s superior jurisdiction and comply with punishment without attempts to control proceedings.

As ought indicates moral obligation, the value is Morality, defined as the principles that guide right or wrong action. Regardless of form, all conceptions of morality seek to alleviate human suffering. Specifically, nations have an overriding moral obligation to prevent kleptocracy because as Sonja Starr 2 explains, kleptocracies are the enablers of modern atrocity.

Grand corruption is also intimately intertwined with a range of other human rights concerns. First, "one cannot talk realistically of a fundamental right to life when this life can barely be sustained because it is cut off from the most basic necessities of food, shelter, and medical care." n136 Some African feminists have framed the issue of corruption as one of gender justice, arguing that it underlies other causes of women's oppression, including poverty, conflict, and disease. n137 Furthermore, kleptocracy "affords both motive and opportunity to violate human rights violently," as leaders will often engage in killings, torture, and disappearances to suppress exposure of their wrongdoing. n138 It can also cause civil wars, as dissatisfaction spurs military coups and competing groups struggle for access to fabulous wealth. n139 David Crane, when he was head prosecutor at the Sierra Leone Special Court, recognized this point: The devils we dance with everyday are not only the criminal actors being prosecuted, but the peripheral players who have been involved in this decade long tragedy. These actors include gun runners, diamond dealers, the Russian and Ukrainian mafia, other international criminal organizations, and terrorists, to include Hezbollah and Al Qaeda. All of them were involved in West Africa taking blood diamonds from the mines of eastern Sierra Leone and trading them for cash to buy weapons to sustain the conflicts... . The catalyst for this type of non-traditional conflict is impunity and corruption... . This lack of respect for the law and for institutions becomes a powder keg which any warlord in the region can ignite for their own personal criminal advantage and gain. n140 These secondary effects are not necessary or sufficient to qualify grand corruption as an international crime, but they provide additional reasons that corruption-related crimes may be worth prosecuting. Moreover, [Finally] the interrelationship between corruption and violence may mean that efforts to prosecute war criminals are undermined by failure to address the corrupt networks that support them.

Thus, the value criterion is reducing systematic corruption, defined as minimizing the system of governance by those who seek personal wealth at the expense of the governed. The brightline is made clear through standard’s warrants, empirical examples in case, and the definition of crime against humanity. Finally, the lack of a clear brightline should never stop us from taking action when state irresponsibility is tangible and moral harm is imminent. This is the standard for two additional reasons.

First, major corruption is the greatest violation of the reciprocal agreement between citizen and state because leaders manipulate total production away from protective measures or social programs and towards personal gain. Thus, states have an overriding moral obligation to prevent it in order to rectify the imbalance in sovereign fulfillment.

Second, major corruption is an irreversible form of oppression because it closes off all forms of political change. Professor James Robinson describes how kleptocrats prevent opposition.

In this paper, we suggest a generalization of this reasoning, which we dub the "divide-and-rule" strategy. Divide-and-rule is a method used by kleptocrats to maintain power in weakly-institutionalized polities while simultaneously pursuing policies costly to society [by] The logic of the divide-and-rule strategy is to enable a ruler to brib[ing]e politically pivotal groups off the equilibrium path, ensuring that he can remain in power against challenges. To remove a ruler from power requires the cooperation of distinct social groups which is made difficult by the collective action problem (Olson, 1965). By providing selective incentives and punishments, the divide-and-rule strategy exploits the fragility of social cooperation: when faced with the threat of being ousted, the kleptocratic ruler intensifies the collective action problem and destroys the coalition against him by bribing the pivotal groups.

Therefore, in contrast to other harms, unrestrained grand corruption makes the moral sphere irrelevant because there is no way for moral deliberation to translate to social application. Reducing systematic corruption is a moral gateway to the evaluation of other harms.

My thesis and sole contention is the American submission reduces systematic corruption by cutting off foreign military aid and reversing sovereign immunity.

Subpoint A: Submission stops American military assistance to repressive governments.
Elizabeth Powers explains that the United States provides the financial and military assistance that allows corrupt regimes to survive.

Commercial sales of conventional weapons, n1 military services, and small arms and light weapons (SA/LW) n2 net billions of dollars for U.S. businesses each year. n3 Military assistance (i.e., government-to-government military aid) pours additional billions into the arms and military services industry. n4 In 2008 military assistance ranked third on the U.S. foreign aid budget. n5 [These] Weapons sales and military assistance are the lifeblood of many corrupt leaders, [who] These leaders line their coffers with government money meant to be used for military assistance purposes, and use the acquired weaponry to engage in international antagonism and the repression of their citizens. n6 A glaring example of the negative effects of developing world arms spending sprees is the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo), n7 where military assistance and United States-supplied weapons enabled [*384] Mobutu Sese Seko (Mobutu) to retain power for over thirty years. n8 Mobutu's downfall precipitated the Congo Conflict, which has lasted for over seven years and cost more than 3.8 million lives. n9 The reverberations of the Congo Conflict are still felt throughout Central Africa. n10 Over $ 9 billion has been poured by the international community into the DR Congo to pick up the pieces left in the wake of the Congo Conflict. n11

Historically, from the Congo to the Philippines to Haiti, the United States has been the primary supporter for kleptocracies. The Rand Corporation in 2006 describes that this support continues today under the mentality that US security trumps all other concerns.

Indeed, several major U.S. partners in the war on terrorism—in particular, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt—are not democratic, have repressive security forces, and yet receive U.S. security assistance. Moreover, This argument was used to support the CIA rendition program that has been used in the capture and detention of terrorist suspects. As Michael Scheuer, former head of the CIA’s bin Laden unit, argued, cooperation with repressive states was necessary “in order to hold people who were a threat to the United States.”

By submitting, the United States will be at risk of prosecution for aiding and abetting crimes against humanity under Article 25 Section D, deterring misguided military assistance. Associate Professor Jamie Mayerfeld furthers:

If the [In the] United States had ratified the Rome Statute, the knowledge that such behavior would make leading government officials vulnerable to prosecution would be a powerful disincentive to engage in the behavior. This awareness would reverberate throughout the public sphere, reminding citizens and elites that torture and ill treatment are crimes under international law and that they had renewed their commitment to such law when they ratified the Rome Statute. It would encourag[ing] them [citizens] to carefully examine serious allegations that leading government officials had committed war crimes and crimes against humanity. The Department of Justice, armed with empowering legislation presumably enacted for the purpose by Congress, would be poised to launch effective investigations into such allegations so as to forestall the complementary jurisdiction of the ICC.

With guaranteed accountability for officials and a tighter vetting process for military aid, the United States will stop supporting these regimes. The impacts are threefold.
First, deprived of American arms and American dollars, the corrupt regime will have reduced ability to commit human rights abuses because it has a weaker state police and less oppressive state control.
Second, absent military aid, the corrupt regime can no longer fend off international antagonism, intervention, and prosecution because it has neither the resources nor political capital to pose a threat. Thus, submission enables international prosecution.
And third, without American assistance, repressive regimes no longer have the resources to bribe off political coalitions, and so they fall after popular uprising. This is empirically proven in Congo, as Elizabeth Powers 2 explains.

The United States provided military assistance to Mobutu throughout his tenure as one of Africa's most infamous dictators. n98 Foreign [American] aid flowed freely into DR Congo despite brutal repression, failed and corrupt parastatals, and downright banditry amongst the upper echelons of government. It took the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the contemporaneous thawing of the Cold War for foreign aid to the DR Congo to significantly diminish. n100 Unable to hold the reins of government without large U.S. aid packages, Mobutu was overthrown in 1996.

Subpoint B: Submission removes the American safe haven for kleptocrats.
In addition to funding their regimes, transporting them with American planes, and offering them a place to stay after state collapse, the United States often grants immunity to former kleptocrats. Free to spend, distribute, and waste stolen money until their death, kleptocrats live with absolute freedom. The Georgetown Center on Law writes in 2009

In considering the TVPA, the majority of [American federal] courts have reasoned that Congress intended that FSIA [the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act] should immunize all conduct expressly ratified by foreign governments, even when the challenged conduct is torture or other [an] egregious human rights violations (see example here). FSIA therefore protects Samantar under the majority view, and the district court ruled accordingly when the government of Somalia wrote in support of Samantar claiming that any actions, including all those alleged in the plaintiff’s complaint, fell within the scope of his official duties.
Courts have ruled that individuals acting in their official capacities are also subject to FSIA immunity. However, defendants acting outside their official capacities do not. An official of a foreign government is acting within his official capacity when two conditions are met: (1) the defendant’s actions are lawful according to the laws of defendant’s state (and thus within the scope of his authority), or (2) those actions were authorized by a public admission of that foreign state. Under the majority view, FSIA immunity has largely been up to the defendant’s home government’s decision to ratify conduct or not. Previous cases have emphasized whether the government in question was willing to ratify the controversial acts of its officers. In two recent cases, [former] Israeli generals were sued under TVPA for ordering bombings against Lebanon and Gaza. In these cases, the Israeli government wrote to the State Department requesting that the suits be dismissed as the generals had been acting in their official capacities and asserting that allowing the suits to proceed would have been akin to suing the State of Israel itself. The U.S. State Department submitted a Statement of Interest (SOI) in Matar (but not Belhas) urging dismissal based on sovereign immunity. Both Belhas and Matar [and the cases] were dismissed based on immunity under FSIA, reflecting the position of the majority of the Circuits.

After submission, the United States will be forced to end sovereign immunity under the Rome Statute and through complementary conditions. Sonja Starr 3 describes the power of the ICC when it comes to stolen assets.

Effectiveness of International Prosecution of Grand Corruption. - There are several reasons to believe that international prosecution, in particular before the ICC, offers significant potential as a response to grand corruption. First, this approach [international prosecution] offers a realistic prospect of getting substantial amounts of the stolen money back. The ICC has the power to order asset forfeitures as a penalty and asset freezes and tracing at the investigation stage, and all member states must comply. n149 Assuming the defendants can be captured, tried and convicted, the court can distribute forfeited funds and fines to victims through a trust fund or, alternatively, order defendants to pay reparations directly to victims. n150 Criminal findings could also enable subsequent civil suits, including against corporations and banks. n151

Thus, the impacts are threefold.
First, submission allows for the return of stolen money to victim nations, spurring economic development and individual protection. Prosecution rectifies the imbalance created by the kleptocrats and so dilutes their future power.
Second, submission frees the United States from the sovereign immunity doctrine for kleptocracy, both ensuring international prosecution and enabling domestic application to prosecute. By removing the safe haven that allows corrupt leaders to live freely, prosecution reduces the incentive for kleptocracies to form in the future.
Third, ensured prosecution illuminates the shadow networks surrounding kleptocracies.
Sonja Starr 4 concludes the affirmative.

Third, international prosecution could also contribute to transparency, including by exposing the roles of foreign companies and potentially subjecting them to further domestic investigations. The importance of this effect should not be underestimated. There is a reason kleptocrats around the world use off-budget transactions that violate their own domestic laws, rather than, for instance, openly declaring that they are entitled to take astronomical sums from the treasury (for example, via a "tax"). Even these strongmen face domestic and international pressures that limit their powers; they could not get away with open looting. Nor could their international collaborators get away with funding a regime that openly used the proceeds for the leaders' personal enrichment. Transparency is thus a crucial anti-corruption measure; corruption could not flourish without secrecy. n154

Thus, because submission ends the rule by thieves, I affirm.

Cites:
Starr, Sonja. Spring, 2007. [Climenko Fellow and Lecturer on Law, Harvard Law School. Former legal officer at the Appeals Chamber for the ICTY.] Extraordinary Crimes at Ordinary Times: International Justice Beyond Crisis Situations. Northwestern University Law Review. 101 Nw. U.L. Rev. 1257. LexisNexis. BRL
James A. Robinson, Daron Acemoglu, Thierry Verdier. July, 2003. Kleptocracy and Divide-and-Rule: A Model of Personal Rule. SSRN. BRL
Elizabeth Powers. 2008. [Law Clerk for Kristine Demay. B.A. in political science and international relations from University of Minnesota-Duluth in 04 and J.D. from William Mitchell College of Law in 07]. Greed, Guns, and Grist: U.S. Military Assistance and Arms Transfers to Developing Countries. North Dakota Law Review. 84 N. Dak. L. Rev. 383. LexisNexis. BRL
The Rand Corporation. 2006. Seth G. Jones, Olga Oliker, Peter Chalk, C. Christine Fair, Rollie Lal, James Dobbins. [RAND National Security Research Division conducts research and analysis for the Office of the Secretary of Defense, etc.] Securing Tyrants or Fostering Reform?: US Internal Security Assistance to Repressive and Transitioning Regimes. International Security and Defense Policy Center. BRL
Mayerfield, Jamie. Spring, 2007. [Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Washington] Playing by Our Own Rules: How U.S. Marginalization of International Human Rights Law Led to Torture. President and Fellows of Harvard College. The Harvard Human Rights Journal.
Wappett-Kendall, Sarah. February 11, 2009. Georgetown Center for National Security and Law. Overseen by David Cole, David Luban, etc. <http://www.securitylawbrief.com/commentary/2009/02/4th-circuit-removes-fsia-hurdle-to-most-torture-suits.html>. BRL

HUMAN TRAFFICKING AC (TOC ELIMS - EARLIER VERSION BROKEN BY ELLEN)


Because submission masters systematic subjugation, I affirm:
I define,
The best example of “an international court” is the ICC because it is the only available empirical analog that adheres to the resolution since it is the only one explicitly designed to prosecute crimes against humanity while using the term “court”. Submit to the jurisdiction of: means the US will ratify the Rome Statute, so within the limits of complementarity, the US will extradite any of its citizens accused of crimes against humanity to the ICC and provide any necessary information for investigations.
Crimes against Humanity are defined by Article 7 of the Rome Statue, which includes human trafficking as a crime against humanity.

DR. MOHAMED MATTAR at the THE PROTECTION PROJECT explains:
The ICC Statute includes trafficking in persons as a crime against humanity[,explicitly prohibiting]. Crimes against humanity are defined under Article 7 of the ICC Statute to include “enslavement,” “sexual slavery,” “enforced prostitution,” and “any other form of sexual violence of comparable gravity.”

Thus, the prosecution of human trafficking qualifies as prosecution of crimes against humanity under the Rome Statute.

As ought indicates moral obligation, The value is Morality, defined as principles that guide right or wrong action. Regardless of form, all conceptions of morality seek to alleviate human suffering. Specifically, states have an overriding moral obligation to prevent human trafficking because trafficking destroys the concept of humanity.

NILANJANA RAY writes:
Human trafficking, i.e. the objectifi[es]cation of human life into a commodity for the market, is brutal in its concept as well as implementation. It views humans as commodities to be bought and sold, used and exploited, and then discarded. It is successful because it targets the most vulnerable and marginalized groups that are already struggling to survive on the lowest rungs of the socioeconomic hierarchy. The empirical studies have revealed shocking statistics. Human trafficking, especially of women and children, has spread its tentacles globally and has become literally omnipresent. No country today can claim to be untouched. If not a source country of victims or a destination country for exploitation, the country will at least act as a transit route for the journey of the victims, a journey that is driven by hope and hunger. Such is the journey each year for 600,000 to 800,000 people - 80% of whom are women and up to 50% of whom are minors - trafficked across international borders for sexual and labour exploitation. This trade in human misery generates a profit of nine billion dollars annually [and]. Even more horrifying are the narratives of women and children caught in conditions of extreme abuse and exploitation. The shift of preference by criminal organizations from drug and arms trafficking to human trafficking is attributed to the high profit, small expenditure, and comparatively lower risk of punishment. Additionally, the exploitation of people is a more consistently profitable business when compared to the one-time profits of drug and arms trafficking.

Thus, while other egregious harms attempt to improve some segment of humanity, trafficking unconditionally sacrifices humanity for profit.
As such, the value criterion is REDUCING HUMAN TRAFFICKING. This is true for two additional reasons.

First, human trafficking represents the greatest modern moral concern. We know that the problem affects millions, as the U.S. Department of State reported in its most recent Trafficking In Persons or TIP Report:
A wide range of estimates exists on the scope and magnitude of modern-day slavery. The International Labor Organization (ILO)—the United Nations agency charged with addressing labor standards, employment, and social protection issues—estimates that there are 12.3 million people in forced labor, bonded labor, forced child labor, and sexual servitude at any given time; other estimates range from 4 million to 27 million. Annually, according to U.S. Government sponsored research completed in 2006, approximately 800,000 people are trafficked across national borders, which does not include millions trafficked within their own countries. Approximately 80 percent of transnational victims are women and girls and up to 50 percent are minors. The majority of transnational victims are females trafficked into commercial sexual exploitation. These numbers do not include millions of female and male victims around the world who are trafficked within their own national borders—the majority for forced or bonded labor.

Second, human trafficking is a gateway to other crimes against humanity because once made sub-human and invisible, the trafficked person can no longer access community-based protection because they are not recognized as legitimate persons. And once made stateless, they have no recourse against rape, murder, slavery, and other crimes against humanity. Moreover, trafficking fuels industries of crime by providing expendable human capital to criminal organizations. For instance, the TIP Report associates the following crime industries as driven by trafficking: involuntary servitude of workers, forced child labor, child soldiers, child sex tourism, and sex trafficking.

Your decision calculus in this round is very simple: If affirming the resolution comparatively reduces trafficking through prosecution, you affirm. I contend that it does.
SUBPOINT A. Submission will open ICC prosecution to those trafficked to the United States.
The STATE DEPARTMENT TIP REPORT 2 explains:
The United States (U.S.) is a destination country for thousands of men, women, and children trafficked largely from East Asia, Mexico, and Central America for the purposes of sexual and labor exploitation. A majority of foreign victims identified during the year were victims of trafficking for forced labor. Some men and women, responding to fraudulent offers of employment in the United States, migrate willingly—legally and illegally—but are subsequently subjected to conditions of involuntary servitude or debt bondage at work sites or in the commercial sex trade.

The impact is that lack of U.S. submission provides legal cover for traffickers in that as long as the U.S. does not ratify the Rome Statute, traffickers will know the U.S. is a safe haven destination. Submission reverses the safe haven into a prosecutorial opportunity.

SARAH DILL explains how ICC prosecution needs U.S. submission:

The ICC also cannot be a tribunal to prosecute traffickers or provide restitution to victims due to the refusal of states to sign the treaty. The states where the trafficking problem is most significant (Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, the United States, Mexico, and Russia) are not parties to the Rome Statute. Thus, unless a victim is taken to or from a state that is a member of the Rome Statute, or the trafficker is a national of a member state, no prosecution may be brought. Given the large number of states that have not accepted the jurisdiction of the ICC, it is unlikely that the threat of criminal prosecution will deter would-be traffickers, nor would the small number of possible prosecutions assist in reducing the incidences of the criminal activity. There is hope that the ICC will become a viable forum in which to prosecute sex traffickers. Given that the court only recently came into existence, it may be possible for changes to be made in the court's mandate. Additionally, if more nations become member states, it will be possible to prosecute more crimes. However, this would take extensive international cooperation and the willingness of nations where the trafficking problem is the worst to submit to the jurisdiction of the ICC.

Thus, US Submission resolves one barrier to ICC prosecution by opening up prosecutions where the US is the destination country. Eileen Overbaugh in April 2009 explains that prosecution reduces human trafficking by preventing crimes and protecting victims.

Criminal prosecution is critical to combat human trafficking because it prevents further trafficking and protects victims. Cynthia Shepherd Torg, Chief Counsel for the Human Smuggling and Trafficking Center of the Department of Justice, noted: “While efforts to protect victims and prevent further victimization are clearly important goals . . . effective prosecution is the linchpin to eradicating human trafficking. Prosecution, combined with the imposition of significant penalties, not only provides protection by eliminating the perpetrator’s immediate ability to exploit the victim, but also serves to deter[s] future criminal acts.” Thus, prosecution deters further trafficking, incapacitates current traffickers, and removes the powerful financial incentive to traffic through both asset forfeiture and mandatory restitution. Prosecution protects trafficking victims by removing them from immediate danger and averting further harm or exploitation.

SUBPOINT B. Submission recognizes the need for a trans-border approach.

Trafficking is a trans-border crime. Thus, domestic efforts alone are ineffective because the state-sovereign focus is unwelcoming to stateless victims that are necessary for prosecution. DINA FRANCESCA HAYNES explains:

Traffickers cannot be prosecuted without proof, and proof most often comes in the form of witness testimony. Nevertheless, governments regularly fail to require victim protection or preventative programs that focus on potential victims, as a matter of law. Those laws that do contain victim protection measures generally condition that protection on the extent to which the victim will be able to assist with the prosecution of the traffickers.

The effect of these limitations in the US are empirically confirmed. A T-visa is a visa given to a Trafficking victim in the United States provided that she cooperate in the prosecution of traffickers. HAYNES 2 reports:

After all, more than five years after the TVPA had entered into force in the United States, fewer than 600 T-visas had been granted (US DOS 2005). This is in spite of statistics offered by the US government claiming that either 17,500 or 30,000 to 40,000 (depending on which agency report you read) new victims of trafficking enter the United States each year. Congress already had a flear of floodgates in mind when they limited, within the TVPA, the number of T-visas that could be granted each year to 5,000 (US Congress).

Thus, not only are domestic governments ill-equipped to fight trafficking alone, the US legal regime is specifically ill-equipped and the effects are empirically proven. By submitting, the US will be able to take advantage of a court system that caters to victims. Article 68 of the Rome Statute allows for a direct participation in court proceedings to express views and tell stories, even if the victim is not called as a witness. The impacts are twofold

First, submission increases effective prosecution and undermining of trafficking organizations by enabling victims to provide evidence and assist with law enforcement. There is a net benefit of proof to prevent future trafficking.
Second, increased victim participation exposes the shadow networks surrounding human trafficking by providing unique testimony about the internal workings of the system. This both enables future prosecution of the organizations working with human traffickers and results in better targeted domestic measures to dilute criminal power.

SUBPOINT C. Submission allows for more effective international prosecution. The ICC has the ability to work as a conduit for international cooperation. In fact, Articles 86, 87, and especially 93 of the Rome Statute requires member states to cooperate in terms of providing assistance to investigations and prosecutions.
This kind of cooperation is key to effective trafficking prosecution.
ANNA GEKHT writes in 2008:
Although the states have acknowledged the graveness of the consequences of trafficking, government complacency, corruption and lack of political will resulted in unchecked escalation of trafficking in human beings. The connection of trafficking and prostitution, together with strict state immigration policies have stalled international legal and political counter-trafficking efforts. The widespread nature of human trafficking, violations of fundamental principles of international law and human rights it implies, and evident fragmentation and lack of effectiveness and enforcement capacity of current laws, suggest a need for reform. The process of trafficking consists of three distinct phases, interconnected but not entirely dependent on each other: (i) the actual act of trafficking; (ii) the subsequent phase of exploitation that the act of trafficking is committed for; and (iii) post-trafficking rehabilitation. n1 The execution of the act of trafficking is independent of the realization of its intended purpose and implies the notion of criminal intent as its main characteristic. The structure of the trafficking chains involves (a) agents in the home state of the victims, (b) the transit states which host the victims on their way to final destination, and (c) the states receiving [states] the victims of traffic. The three distinct components of the chain involve a multiplicity of different countries and thus evoke different aspects of human rights, criminal, immigration, labor and public international law, and imply different international obligations and responsibilities of the states involved. Being an international malady, trafficking cannot be solved by independent domestic responses. This essay will argue that in order for the anti-trafficking policies to become successful they must combine and integrate the various obligations of the involved countries into a single non-fragmented framework built on the foundations of the norms of international human rights law.

Moreover, American submission unifies all trafficking laws in domestic courts with international courts since it must adopt the same substantive and procedural jurisdiction to avoid the risk of being declared unwilling or unable. Elizabeth Overbaugh 2 explains that uniformity reduces trafficking by preventing geographic exploitation.

Further, to guarantee that the benefits of trafficking do not outweigh the potential for arrest and punishment, uniformity in trafficking laws is necessary to prevent traffickers from shifting their activities to states with weak human trafficking laws. Legal scholars who focus on the intersection of crime and economics suggest that “disparity in legal conditions creates disparate markets, which traffickers exploit for their gain.” One researcher, examining international patterns of human trafficking, argues that because traffickers exploit discrepancies and ambiguities in the law, the international sex trade can be eliminated by using uniform international barriers to trafficking rather than individualized national prosecutions. In other words, criminalization at a national level is insufficient because a single country cannot reach suppliers and consumers outside of the country and cannot protect women and children who are victimized outside the nation’s borders. This argument easily translates to trafficking within the United States. Because traffickers exploit weaknesses and inconsistencies in state laws and because state governments cannot necessarily reach traffickers beyond their borders, the most effective way to attack trafficking is to rely on a uniform federal law. Instead of passing laws to criminalize human trafficking in every state, deterrence of human trafficking will be best accomplished by uniformity on the national level.

Thus, Micheline Slattery, who was forced into slavery at the age of five, taken from Haiti at the age of 14 and sold in the United States, concludes the affirmative:
“It is really tough when you have been programmed to believe you are worthless,”
“I want the world to know that slavery is not history, it still exists.”

Cites:

http://www.protectionproject.org/commentary/icc.htm
Nilanjana Ray, former Consultant in the Anti-Trafficking Section of UNICEF India; PhD on Child Labour in India; Katherine Kendall Scholar of the Doctoral Programme in Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis, Looking at Trafficking Through a New Lens, 12 Cardozo Journal of Law & Gender 909, p. 909 (Summer 2006).
U.S. Department of State, Trafficking in Persons Report, June 2008, p. 7.
U.S. Department of State, Trafficking in Persons Report, June 2008, p. 51.
Sara Elizabeth Dill, a lawyer with Catholic Legal Services, Old Crimes in New Times; Human Trafficking and the Modern Justice System, 21 Criminal Justice 12 (American Bar Association). 2006.
Dina Francesca Haynes, Associate Professor at New England College of Law, “Human Trafficking and Migration” a chapter of the book Human Rights in Crisis. (2008). p. 115.
Anna Gekht, LLM in Public International Law from Universitieit Leiden, Leiden, The Netherlands, 37 Denver Journal of International Law and Policy 29, pp. 29-30 (Winter 2008).
http://actioncenter.polarisproject.org/the-frontlines/survivor-testimonies/39-testimonies-us/288-human-trafficking-victim-speaks-out-in-aiken-nbc-augusta-september-15-2008
Fausto Pocar, Prof. of International Law at University of Milan and President of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, The Hague, Human Trafficking: A Crime Against Humanity, a chapter in Measuring Human Trafficking: Complexities and Pitfalls, (Ernesto U. Savona and Sonia Stefanizzi, eds.). 2007. pp. 7-9.
U.S. Department of State, Trafficking in Persons Report, June 2008, p. 5.
Eileen Overbaugh, .J.D. Candidate, May 2009, Seton Hall University School of Law. “Human Trafficking: The Need for Federal Prosecution of Accused Traffickers.” April 6, 2009. Seton Hall University Law Review.