During 1998 and 1999, I participated in a series of meetings in Vienna convened under the auspices of the United Nations. Their purpose was to hammer out, as quickly as possible, an international agreement on transnational organized crime, as well as a set of supplementary protocols on the specific issues of trafficking, migrant smuggling, and the trade in small arms. My job, as the representative of Mary Robinson, the then-High Commissioner for Human Rights, was to use her voice in persuading States not to dilute or let go of the basic international human rights principles to which they were already committed. We had good reason to be worried. Migrant smuggling had recently been identified as a security threat by the preferred destination countries in Europe, North America, and Australia, and had moved from the margins to the mainstream of international political concern. Human trafficking, an obscure but jealously guarded mandate of the UN's human rights system, had been similarly elevated and, in the process, unceremoniously snatched away from its traditional home.

For those of us from the United Nations' various human rights and humanitarian agencies thrown together in Vienna, the existence of a very real problem was beyond dispute. Despite an impressive, if disparate, array of international legal protections, it was clear to our organizations that forced labor, child labor, debt bondage, forced marriage, and commercial sexual exploitation of children and adults were flourishing, virtually unchecked in many parts of the world.