By Ilias Chatzis, under the substantive guidance of Morgane Nicot, Martin Hemmi and Pascale Reinke-Schreiber

Migrant smuggling is a type of organized crime with links to other serious criminal offences, including illicit financial flows, corruption and trafficking in persons. Smuggling is an illegal service that is offered to countless people and requires a financial or material remuneration. Many migrants who do not have other viable options to move across borders, regularly depend on the services provided by smugglers to migrate. In principle, once the smuggling transaction is completed and the person arrives at the desired destination, the relationship between the smuggler and the migrant ceases without any harm being done. Too often, however, smuggled migrants and refugees suffer from various dangerous circumstances and abusive and violent treatment while under the control of smugglers. This Study considers the underlying risk factors that lead to abuse and violence during the smuggling operation and analyses whether gender influences the type of violence that is inflicted upon smuggled migrants. It also analyses the criminal justice responses to these abuses and the practical obstacles that may hamper the reporting, investigating or prosecuting of these “aggravations”. Finally, the Study provides recommendations for reducing the impunity of the people involved in such offences along the smuggling routes. UNODC, through the analysis of case law within its Knowledge Portal on Smuggling of Migrants, noted that there was little evidence of migrant smuggling being prosecuted in the countries where the smuggling venture occurred, let alone for cases where smuggling became abusive or exploitative. Yet, civil society, researchers and academia have increasingly raised their concerns over the extreme violence faced by people on the move along certain routes. To have a better understanding of the dynamics at play and the challenges to obtain justice in this context, this Study looks into two major transit regions, North Africa and Central America. It uses recently collected data from the UNODC Observatory on Migrant Smuggling that contains testimonies from frontline responders, smuggled migrants and migrant smugglers from West and North Africa. Aggravations occurring along the Central Mediterranean route also feature in the Study, as they are characteristic of the various types of abuse that migrants face before embarking on their dangerous sea crossings. It is often over those cases that courts in destination countries assess jurisdiction to prosecute smugglers and provide access to justice to the affected smuggled migrants. Practitioners were also interviewed for the Study to gain knowledge about smuggling characteristics in Central America. The present Study therefore focuses on these two regions, typically coined as transit regions for migrant smuggling operations.

Vienna: UNODC, 2021. 102p.