Morocco Launches National Commission to Combat Human Trafficking

A true modern form of slavery that challenges the collective conscience, human trafficking with its corollary of sexual exploitation, forced labor, and organ trafficking, is a real social drama against which a relentless struggle must be waged, to give the human species all its value.

The Prime Minister first recalled the existence of the Law on Combating Trafficking in Human Beings, which was adopted in 2016. According to Saad-Eddine El Othmani, who considers the phenomenon as "a form of humiliation and degradation of criminalized human dignity", the creation of this new commission "crowns the efforts made by the country to tackle this phenomenon and consolidate human rights and gender equality as necessary conditions for the protection of human dignity and the improvement of the quality of life".

Drawn from various ministerial departments and security, national institutions and civil society organizations, the members of this national commission will have to conduct an internal field study and prepare a database before proposing concrete measures to the government.

For the record, in 2017, 47 people were suspected of human trafficking in Morocco. A report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) published in January this year reported 27 victims of human trafficking identified in 2017. 47 people, including 27 men and 20 women, were brought before the courts for being suspected, arrested or held in custody for human trafficking, during the same year.