The Women's Freedom Network Newsletter Sept/Oct and Nov/Dec, 1999, Vol. 6, Nos. 5 & 6. NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON SEXUAL TRAFFICKING Luncheon Speaker: Maureen Walsh Counselor on the Helsinki Commission Maureen Walsh

I serve as counsel to the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, which is also known as the Helsinki Commission. The commission is an independent agency of the United States government. Congressman Smith currently serves as our chairman. The commission's mandate is to monitor and encourage compliance with the political commitments made in the Helsinki Final Act and subsequent documents, that were signed by 54 participating states, of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe-- that's the OSCE. Those participating states include all the states of Europe and Euro-Asia, plus Canada and the United States.

In 1991, those states signed a document in Moscow that committed them "to seek to eliminate all forms of violence against women and all forms of traffic in women, including by ensuring adequate legal prohibitions against such acts and other appropriate measures."

Unfortunately, despite this nearly decade-old commitment, the issue of trafficking in human beings is one that the Helsinki Commission, and indeed the OSCE as an institution, have only begun to address in earnest within the past year. During that year however, Congressman Smith has personally devoted much attention to the problem of trafficking from both the legislative side, by introducing legislation to stop trafficking, and also in the international area as the chairman of the Helsinki Commission.

Fortunately, these issues are beginning to get more attention. the attention they deserve, in various international forums. In the OSCE context, certainly, the attention is finally being paid to fulfilling the 1991 Moscow document commitment.

This past July after the Helsinki Commission Hearing, Congressman Smith lead a bipartisan delegation of 17 members of the House and Senate to the annual meeting of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly in St. Petersburg, Russia. At that meeting, he introduced a resolution condemning the trafficking of women and children, and calling for the governments of OSCE participating states to adopt the legislation and enforcement mechanisms necessary to punish trafficking perpetrators, and to ensure that the human rights of the trafficking victims are protected. And 275 legislatures from 52 countries in Europe and North America attended this meeting, and the resolution was unanimously adopted.

That resolution, unfortunately, is not a binding commitment on participating states, but it is certainly along the lines of a sense of the Congress resolution. The OSCE Parliamentary Assembly has made a strong statement about the importance of addressing this issue.

Earlier this year, the United States government also seconded a specialist on trafficking issues to the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights to focus exclusively on this problem in the OSCE region.

Yesterday at the OSCE Review Conference that is ongoing in Istanbul, the trafficking advisor proposed an extensive action plan for the year 2000, with concrete recommendations for action by the OSCE as an institution and also by participating states to aggressively tackle the problem.

In addition, as many of you may know, there are negotiations that are on-going in Vienna, where the United States is actively advancing a protocol on trafficking as part of a proposed UN convention against transnational organized crime. These efforts are a welcome sign of progress. Trafficking is, in one respect, a transnational crime problem, so that it cannot be addressed solely by laws that stop at country's borders. To successfully combat trafficking will require bi-lateral and multi-lateral cooperation, and these international efforts are well suited to produce those results. Bilateral solutions are not the whole answer. Part of the problem is effectively prosecuting traffickers and protecting victims under the domestic laws of states.