UK’s Afghan human trafficking surge

The Taliban takeover in Afghanistan is fuelling one of the darkest of illicit trades: in humans.

The long-suffering nation had already begun to see an uptick in people trafficking cases before the current crisis, whether due to people being taken against their will or taken advantage of after asking smugglers to get them out. In 2020 Afghanistan appeared for the first time in the top ten
nationalities most reported to a helpline run by Unseen, a U.K. charity fighting exploitation.

“If you want to say what caused it, Donald Trump’s deal with the Taliban was a signal for people to think ‘this is not going to end well, we need to get out of this situation, because if the Taliban take control, my life will be at risk,’” said Andrew Wallis, chief executive of Unseen.

People smuggling and people trafficking are distinct. The first involves someone choosing to hand cash to a criminal network to move them across borders. The second involves someone being moved via deception or against their will, often ending up in some form of enslavement.

But because people looking to be smuggled are vulnerable and willing to put themselves in the hands of a black market, smuggling has a habit of turning into trafficking. 

Wallis is concerned that new laws being pushed through the U.K. parliament which aim to toughen asylum rules will make it harder to detect victims of trafficking and increase the risk to vulnerable people, since the threat of being deported will be raised. “The Afghan situation should be a wake up call to MPs to really carefully examine this proposed legislation and change it,” he said.

Britain helped some 15,000 people to safety during the evacuation in Kabul last month, but that largely ended when the western nations fled the capital. The Home Office is promising to take in a further 20,000 over the next five years, but how the scheme will operate with the Taliban in charge is an open question.

“The whole of Europe now faces another migration crisis in the way we saw from Syria a few years ago,
because, of course, people are going to be wanting to find safety and sanctuary away from persecution,” said Karen Bradley, a former Cabinet minister and now chair of a parliamentary committee on human trafficking and modern slavery.

But she said offering a “clear, generous, compassionate route” for those eligible to come to the U.K. should afford some protection. “If we’re going to reduce the number of people in modern slavery across the world, we need to find a way of breaking the cycle; we need to find a way of stopping them falling into the hands of the traffickers,” she said.

A Home Office spokesperson said: “Human trafficking has absolutely no place in our society and we are committed to fortifying our immigration system against these heinous crimes, whilst ensuring victims are protected and offenders prosecuted. The government’s new plan for immigration will welcome people through safe and
legal routes whilst preventing abuse of the system, cracking down on illegal entry and the criminality associated with it.” Others are less hopeful about the government having the tools to crack down on trafficking. “Under [former Prime Minister] Theresa May, the government was very committed to the issue of modern slavery,” said Darren Jones, a Labour MP and vice chair of the same committee.
But he said not all the promised reforms had come to fruition, arguing “it almost seems like the government has relegated this as an issue.”

Meanwhile, the U.K. losing access to EU crime-fighting databases post-Brexit has not helped. 

Those targeting vulnerable people attempting to flee Afghanistan have no end of dark aims in mind. “Commercial sexual exploitation, child sexual exploitation, recruitment of children for armed groups as well as labor exploitation are the most relevant types of human trafficking that the criminal networks can be involved with in Afghanistan,” said Shahrzad Fouladvand, a lecturer in international criminal law at the University of Sussex. 

A high number of those attempting to leave are women and girls at risk of ending up in forced marriages under the Taliban regime. The most common routes are through Turkey, then either into Eastern Europe or across the water to Italy. Reaching Italy from Libya via the Mediterranean is also popular.

People might cross the English Channel in small boats or in freight containers or other vehicles, sometimes with those driving complicit in the crime and sometimes without their knowledge. 

A spokesperson for the National Crime Agency said the organization “continues to assess what impact events in Afghanistan might have on organized immigration crime impacting the U.K., however we know instability is a driver for irregular migration so it is highly likely that the threat will increase.” The spokesperson added: “Afghan migrants are already amongst the most common nationalities detected entering the U.K. irregularly using a wide variety of methods.” People smugglers and human traffickers are sometimes seasoned organized criminals, and sometimes normal people without a better income who spot a chance to make some cash. “Crudely, it comes down to how much money you have that determines how you’re then brought into the United Kingdom,” said Wallis from Unseen. “You find out who the smugglers are, they charge you an absolute fortune, and then they smuggle you across, either by land or sea, to where you’re trying to get to.”

It’s not one kingpin or organization that oversees the entire route, but individual groups who take people across one leg of a journey, and might have contacts to hook them up with another group for the next. 

“It seems to be an interconnected network, but it’s a very dispersed model,” said Wallis. “So it isn’t Smugglers Inc. based in Stafford with offices all across the globe. It’s the interconnectedness of organized criminality that enables them to move from one group to another.”

The challenge is for nations to spot irregular movements and try to shield people from the risk. “Working closely with third countries where Afghans are transiting can help to process the identification of vulnerable individuals proactively and efficiently,” said Fouladvand.

But once trafficked victims arrive at their end destination and are put to work under enslavement, it becomes all the harder to find them. People are imprisoned and have their passports taken, before being told that attempting to escape without a passport will get them deported by the authorities.