Trafficking in human beings is a human rights violation that is expressly prohibited in the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights (Article 5, paragraph 3). In line with Directive 2011/36/EU on preventing and combatting trafficking in human beings and protecting its victims (adopted in 2011), and a Communication on the EU Strategy towards the Eradication of Trafficking in Human Beings 2012-2016 (adopted by the Commission in 2012 and endorsed by the Justice and Home Affairs Council), the European Commission has collected data on trafficking at the European level. Comprehensive and comparable data on trafficking in human beings at the European level will allow for a better assessment of the nature of the problem and enable more accurate conclusions.
Data on trafficking has been collected through questionnaires sent to countries’ National Statistical Offices. These questionnaires covered information on victims as well as traffickers.
Please note that the data on trafficking is affected by some comparability issues. These primarily relate to imprecise definitions, improper classifications and differences in units of measurement. More specifically:
- Not all Member States have provided comprehensive data on all indicators displayed in the Gender Statistics Database. In view of this, and the differences between national definitions and recording systems, figures should be interpreted with caution, and with careful consideration of the methodological notes provided. A higher number of reported cases does not necessarily mean that a country has more victims than another country. Nor is it necessarily an indication of a better identification or recording system.
- The data have been collected under different registering systems and procedures, which can, for example, apply different counting rules. While careful attention has been given to the way the data were collected, to minimise potential double or under counting, the complexity and the heterogeneous characteristics of the various data collection mechanisms, mean that it is difficult to make reliable comparisons between the data.
- Measuring trafficking in human beings across countries remains a very complex task. It is important to stress that differences which still exist in the process of recording data, as well as differences between national legal definitions, make it difficult to compare and assess trends across EU Member States
- The European Commission’s descriptive statistics on trafficking are based solely on official administrative statistical data registered by a range of different organisations. It measures the victims and traffickers that have come into contact with authorities and actors at national level. It does not aspire to measure the full extent of the phenomenon of trafficking in human beings and it does not include estimates. Unlike other reports looking at estimates or prevalence of trafficking in human beings, this data are based on a working paper on statistical data as submitted by national authorities.