 Great. Well welcome everyone. Thank you so much for being here. I am Nicole Golden. I'm the director of the Youth Prosperity and Security Initiative here at CSIS, run in partnership with the International Youth Foundation. And we're very grateful to have this conversation today on Wednesday. Many of you may know the State Department released its annual Trafficking in Persons report looking at and assessing 188 countries along 11 minimum Sanjos. We'll hear more about some of the key points from this year's report from the ambassador. At the launch, Secretary Kerry said the following, when we help countries to prosecute traffickers, we are strengthening the rule of law. When we bring victims out of exploitation, we are helping to create more stable and productive communities. When we stop this crime from happening in the first place, we are preventing the abuse of those who are victimized as well as the ripple effect that caused damage to our communities into our broader environment and which corrupt our global supply chains. So we all have an interest in stopping this crime. So we know that in every region of the world, trafficking is a major issue. It's a global security threat and a major source of income for organized crime. Estimates of the human trafficking industry have reached about 32 billion annually, but we'll hear a bit more about that from the ambassador. So really from a global development and prosperity and security situation, this is a major issue. This is a really important conversation. At the same time, this is very much a youth issue in every way. We're going to talk a bit more about that, but we know about 80% of those enslaved are roughly under the age of 24, and the average age for initiation into sexual exploitation, I understand, is around 12. So in every way, this is it's a youth human rights. It's an issue of youth economic opportunity of health of education. Again, in that broader context. So to that end, I'm really pleased to have with us today for this very important conversation. Very honored to have Ambassador Louis C. Tabaka. He is the ambassador, but large senior advisor to the secretary and the director of the office and monitoring combat human trafficking at the Department of State. He was formally the counsel to the House Committee on the Judiciary for Chairman John Conyers. His portfolio included national security, intelligence, immigration, civil rights, and modern slavery issues. Before that, he had an illustrious and very honored, decorated career at the Department of Justice, where he led investigations and prosecution of cases involving many, money laundering, organized crime, smuggling, hate crimes, and human trafficking. So indeed, we cannot have a more distinguished person to have this conversation with today. So thank you, Ambassador, for joining us. And I'm going to start by asking you to sort of tell us broadly your in your letter cover letter to the report is you start by saying sometimes it makes sense to look at the issue by the numbers. So to start us off, can you give us a sense of the scope of where we are on this issue? Well, right now, when we're looking at the numbers, they I think both shock us and have to go to us into action. There's been some improvement in the numbers, and I'll get to that in a second. But at the same time, it's improvement on a very micro scale. It's like a, you know, an ant standing next to Shaquille O'Neal and saying, Hey, I grew a micrometer today. You know, so I think that that's something that we have to look at. So what are what are the numbers we're looking at? The best estimates on on this and their estimates from on the one hand some academics and economists at around 27 to 28 million folks living in bondage worldwide, to the international labor organizations figures, which indicate about 21 21.5 from what they did. There's a little bit of difference in no small part because the economists looked at at some of the traditional practices in Southeast South Asia, especially bonded labor, debt bondage, etc. Perhaps a little differently than the ILO does. But we're talking about, you know, 20 plus million people. In the report this year, we saw about 47,000 victims having been identified by governments. Now, there are more victims out there that get identified by advocates by shelter operators by immigrant rights lawyers, you know, etc. around the world. But these 47,000 that's what we can definitely say these are so much trafficking victims that even governments have said those are trafficking victims. Now that's an increase is a 10% increase over last year, which was about a 20% increase over the year before. So we do see an upward trend in victim identification. But again, the difference between 42,000 victims identified and 47,000 victims identified when you put it up against 20 or 27 million people is still I think pretty embarrassing for all of us in government who need to be out there finding these folks. One other thing by the numbers, the 32 billion number, which is a pretty well researched number from the International Labor Organization comes out of their report in 2009, entitled The Cost of Coercion. In 2009, the International Labor Organization was still partially because of some stovepipes and some jurisdictional issues even within the UN system. The International Labor Organization was still looking at human trafficking as the movement of people into the exploitative phase. And so for them, in 2009, they've since changed, but to them, there were about 2.4 million trafficked people in the world. They've now looked at their interplay between forced labor and trafficking. And now they're saying 20 plus million. But that 32 billion dollars in profits to the traffickers was back when the ILO was claiming that there was about only a tenth as many trafficked victims in the world as they do now. So it'll be interesting to see with the new analysis, the more accurate analysis of the ILO, whether there's then a concomitant increase in that economic effect. I think there probably will be they need to go crunch the numbers. So I don't want to do the math and say, $300 billion or anything like that right now. But I think it's something that we're going to have to watch that space. That gets to the definitional issue. And I apologize for this being the longest answer in the world, Dr. Walden. But the, you know, I think it really comes down to this notion of under both the legal instruments to begin with, but then also customary international law. I think it's very clear at this point that when we're talking about human trafficking, we're not talking about moving people. Although the word trafficking has the effect of making people think that we're talking about all of the activities involved in either reducing someone to or holding them in a condition of compelled service. The president calls it modern slavery. In fact, he said, let's just call it what it really is, slavery. And there are a lot of legal texts that can be written and a lot of legal arguments that can be had about the minute differences between slavery and voluntary servitude, debt bondage, peonage, slavery like practices, practices similar to slavery. Now, if you can tell me the difference between slavery like practices and practices similar to slavery, I'll give you a dollar. You can see where this goes. When you start appealing that you realize that the reason that there's so many different ways that people have sliced and diced this is because there's different organizations, often within the international system or there's different conventions. And so, you know, if you're the 1926 convention, you have to come up with a slightly different term for it than the folks who were dealing with this in 1904, because otherwise why did you get together to negotiate something new? And so that accretes over the years. But I can't for the life of me figure out how to tell the difference when I'm trying to tell a police officer or a social worker, we just rescued this person. Now, instead of figuring out which one of the 12 minute differences that they're dealing with, let's figure out what they need. I think so. We have been a little bit reductionist in saying, you know, all of those different legal concepts can go ahead and exist. But we're going to exist them as though they are indistinguishable. It's kind of like the difference between null and void. You never say something's null or something's void. You say it's null and void. Same thing with human trafficking. Really interesting. So before we unpack that a little bit more, for the benefit of the audience both here in the room and also online, let's take a minute or two to go through some of the notable trends, upgrades, if you will, and downgrades from the report. As many of you know, countries are assessed and placed into, let's maybe call it two and a half tiers, but there's three tiers and then we call it tier two watch list. But what are some of the notable movements that we've seen? And then we'll sort of unpack some of the issues a little bit more. Well, there are four tiers with three numbers to go with them. This shows how logical trafficking movement that world is. Tier two watch list, which Dr. Gold mentioned, is its own category, but it was really invented as a way to say, literally, watch out, you tier two country, you're about to fall to tier three. We see a negative trend. We see a downward trend, a stagnation. What you're saying you're doing is actually just a promise of future action. So we need to see the results for you to really be on tier two or even eventually tier one. Tier one being the highest performers. Now, tier one, it's important to realize what tier one is. It's not an A. It is that a country meets the minimum standards under the law. And the minimum standards are pretty, pretty simple. Do you have a law against trafficking? Are the penalties commensurate with other serious crimes such as rape, extortion, and kidnapping? Surprisingly, in many countries, I should say not so surprisingly, because for so many years, this was seen as a vice offense, kind of under the rubric of, oh, well, prostitution's been around forever, et cetera. So somebody who has enforced prostitution as opposed to somebody who'd suffered an extortion was protected less by the law if you look at the notion of how much their abuser would get in prison time. You know, it was a fine or it was a year in prison or something like that, even if there was evidence that the person was being held against their will. So the minimum standard then says, OK, are you punishing this crime, which is a denial of somebody's freedom? Are you punishing it commensurate with the other similar crimes like kidnapping, rape, et cetera? Is there victim care? Are there prevention efforts? So those are the minimum standards. And if you satisfy those minimum standards as a country, then you're on tier one. But that's really more like a C if you're looking at the American grading system. We're not talking about tier one countries are doing great. It's tier one countries are minimally adequate. And I think that that's something that we haven't maybe communicated as much as we should, because there's some tier one countries out there that could improve, and that's all of them, and there's some tier one countries out there who could really improve. And I think that that's a conversation that we're having more and more. A perfect example, if you look at the Korean narrative from last year and the Korean narrative from this year, a lot of really positive engagement on the part of the Korean government. That was in part the Koreans and in part us working with the Koreans, working together with a close ally and a solid tier one country, but a tier one country that wasn't really moving forward all that much. And now we see them with a new law, past pretty, I think only two two abstentions or something. So, you know, those of you who've seen the fistfights on on YouTube in the Korean Congress will realize that unanimous passage of laws in the Korean Congress is about as rare as it is here. Well, there was a consensus that came together around in Korea, and so that notion of tier one countries can improve. But then it all goes all the way down to tier three. Tier three country is a country that is found to not be taking significant action against trafficking, to not be doing the kind of work that one needs to do. There's, it's not really a bell curve, but it's bell curve like as far as the distribution, and we don't grade on a curve. We look at countries against themselves. So what we would expect out of, I'll just belabor the Korea point, what we would expect out of a Korea versus a Kira boss, for instance. There's more people on one city block in Seoul than there is in the entire island chain in Kira boss. But we look then to see, okay, we know that your police officers may, maybe don't, you know, have only finished high school. The level of training for the, for the police officers, the very small police force in that country is going to be different. So we look at Kira boss against itself, not comparing it against Canada or Korea or others. So I think that that's something, again, that when you're looking at these rankings, it's not a graded on a curve, and it's not an absolute. We're looking for the best Kira body response in that country that is possible, the best Korean response in that country that's possible, and the best U.S. response that's possible. And so those countries that have the ability to deliver a very robust, both social and judicial response to this, we are going to expect them to do more than those countries who are really trying to find their footing on all of these issues. It'd be unfair to do so otherwise. Besides Korea, was there anyone this year that there was a significant improvement, an upgrade, or a downgrade that's sort of notable? Well, you know, I think a lot of the attention this year was around a thing that was called the auto downgrade provision. I don't know if Congress ever called it that, but we started calling it that, and so now that's the term of art. Basically, what happened was that that Tier 2 watch list that I mentioned a minute ago, instead of it being, hey, watch out, you're about to fall to Tier 3, it became, hey, this is kind of comfortable. I can stay here on the watch list for a while, don't have to do all that much, not drop in Tier 3 because I'm doing something, and but I don't really, you know, there's, there was no real consequences for being on the watch list other than vague, embarrassment. And I think that Congress started seeing that it was getting too comfortable, and so, and I think that Congress felt that it was comfortable not only for the, for the foreign countries, but also perhaps for the State Department to just have countries on Tier 2 watch list. And so in the 2008 reauthorization, Congress, to deal with what they called the parking lot issue, said a country can only be on the Tier 2 watch list for two consecutive years, and then they either have to improve or go down, and that makes sense when you say, you know, Tier 2 watch list is, one of the things that you look at is whether there are assurances of future action. Well, if a country says that they're going to do something, two years seems like a reasonable amount of time for them to do it in. This was the first year that that provision kicked in. There was a couple of years of waivers that a country can get if they have those plans of action, if they budget money, if they make those commitments, and it can be waived, but then you can only do that for two years. This is the year when the clock ran out, and we saw that with six countries. Those countries, Iraq, Azerbaijan, Congo, Russia, China, Uzbekistan. Six. In three of those countries, we actually saw quite a bit of movement. We saw the passage of a law in Iraq. We saw the founding of a anti-trafficking task force within the Ministry of Interior. Perhaps more importantly, especially since victim identification is the big theme that we're looking at, not only did they find victims and prosecute cases for the first time, they went into their women's prison, and they sorted the folks who were already in prison, and they found 16 women who they said, you know, that woman's actually a trafficking victim, and brought them out. And so I think that's not only a important policy shift, but maybe even a cultural shift as far as, you know, how one would treat women who have been in this situation. That in some of our NEA countries, we have that issue of, you know, the overlaying of both civil law with the countries that have a French or Ottoman tradition, with Sharia law, and attitudes that don't necessarily have an excuse built in for women in prostitution. That woman is seen as an adulterous, or that woman is seen as a prostitute, even if it was something that was done to her. So the fact that Iraq, for instance, is now going in retroactively screening some of the women in prison, we thought that was very notable. So too with Azerbaijan doing their first forced labor case, in a economy which we know has a lot of forced labor problems, and Congo Brazzaville, which has huge capacity issues, you don't get more than, you know, 20 miles outside of Brazzaville before you realize that there is kind of the idea of functioning rule of law. If something happens to you, will you be able to get justice in the legal system? You might be able to if you're in the capital city, but certainly in the rest of the country, and yet even there we're seeing police responding to trafficking victims. So those three countries, Azerbaijan, Iraq, and Congo Brazzaville, were raised up to tier two on the merits. The other three countries that were on the auto downgrade non-waivable list this year, Russia, China, and Uzbekistan, we didn't see that same kind of forward progress. Now in each of those countries, there are things being done against trafficking, which is why they weren't on tier three in previous years. So you can't say that these countries were doing absolutely nothing. It's just that the engine was just kind of ticking over, and they were properly at the tier two level, but Congress's frustration was you never see that upward trend. They're not in the same situation though, there's a different context in each of these countries. China has a actually a quite good new action plan that came out, came out in April, which is right after the report cycle closes, so it's something that we'll look at for next year's report. But for the first time now in their in their national plan of action you have male victims, the possibility that men can be victims of trafficking, the possibility that people who aren't in what's called an official work group could be protected. Because labor laws in China only applied to people in work groups, and work groups is an official term, and if you're in the underground economy you're not in a work group and therefore you're not covered by labor law. So that notion of bringing those people under the protection. So there's things in that Chinese action plan that we actually think over the next year if they come to fruition we have results that we'll see a positive trend clicking into place. It was Uzbekistan, positive things as far as victim care, especially around sex trafficking victims coming back from Russia. But male victims, nothing. And most importantly for the cotton harvest you have a system of state sanctioned, in fact state demanded forced labor out in the cotton fields to bring in the harvest. And this is something that the other countries in the region have been able to put behind them, to Chikistan, the other Central Asian Republics, moving away from state sponsored forced labor around the cotton harvest. Perversely what's happened is that there's a better market now for laborers in Kazakhstan because it's now free labor instead of state sponsored cotton harvest. And so Uzbek farmers and Uzbek farm workers are going and getting a good salary to pick the Kazakh cotton, which puts even more pressure on the Uzbek cotton harvest. And so instead of bringing in the monitors from the international labor organization to help clean up the cotton harvest, instead of moving away from state sponsored forced labor, we saw the Uzbek government take just some baby steps saying maybe we'll talk about talking. We'll talk about talking is not the kind of thing that we can credit because that's those future actions that would keep somebody on tier two watch list. I know this is a lot like listening to a surgeon talk about all the steps of doing a surgery because the watch list analysis is something that you have to go through fairly carefully, assessing whether something's real or whether something's just kind of a promise, whether it's stagnant or moving forward. Russia, just to put a capper on the on these six countries, Russia is a country where we've again we've seen cases done against sex trafficking. We've seen even some forced labor cases, but we've also seen just in this last year, you know, folks who were rescued from a supermarket in Moscow, Central Asians, who come with promises of good jobs and better life, locked in a basement, brought out to work in the supermarket, locked up again at night. And when they were rescued, what happened to them? Deported. Now this is a supermarket actually ran by a family who one of the other sisters of the family had been prosecuted for doing the same thing about 10 years ago. So they should have been under someone's attention. What's even more incredible is this is a family in which the woman who got prosecuted 10 years ago received a presidential pardon. And so you look at that and you say, okay, well, this would have been a perfect case to put this family out of business entirely. And instead, we see it going in the opposite direction. Vietnamese garment factories, you know, there was a horrible fire in a garment factory where 14 people died. The remaining workers rather than being treated as victims deported as illegal aliens. So we're working with the Russians we're talking to the Russians about that notion of victim care. There's as far as we can tell there's a shelter it opened again kind of after the reporting period. And it's great that they opened a shelter. That shelter has eight beds. That's eight beds in a country of 130 million people in which the best estimates are maybe as many as a million folks being held in forced labor and forced prostitution. So a long way to go as far as victim care is concerned in Russia. So that's kind of the tour through, for lack of a better word, the auto downgrade countries. Fortunity would have it that it's again six countries for next year that we're looking at that have not been able to improve over the over the years. And though there's important countries, you know that we're dealing with, you know, Chad, Malaysia, Thailand, etc. And so as Secretary Kerry said, at the end of the ceremony on Wednesday, and now we're going to start working on next year's report, you know, we're reaching out to our counterparts from those countries, and all of the countries in the world, and figuring out what we're going to do going forward. It's really interesting. And again, for those that are not steeped in this issue and there are copies of the report here, the sort of overarching of all of this is that there are penalties for being on Tier three, and there are implications for being on Tier three, which is what is making the auto downgrade, if you will, of Tier two, such a such an issue, but we'll follow up on that during questions. I want to move from a pick up on something you were just talking about when you talked about each of these stories in terms of the profiles of the countries and what's happening within each country, and it's easy to pick up on the complexity within country. So again, going back to when we've talked a little bit about this in in thinking about this from a from a youth perspective, and we can think about again, sort of young people not only as victims, but as perpetrators. And sometimes that line is even blurred in between from victim to perpetrator, whether that's a force or almost voluntary. So can you talk a little bit about those trends and that ass and that dynamic and how you see it in some examples? I think one of the things to remember about human trafficking is that it is not as clean as we would like it to be. I think that, you know, the society would love to have human trafficking be the classic, you know, kidnapped and locked in a basement and brought out occasionally. You know, I think that's a it's either a Morgan Friedman and Ashley Judd movie, or it's a Liam Neeson movie. I mean, you know, it's it's the kind of things that that frankly when you go back and you see the the theatrical presentations in the 1880s, it's the same story that people were getting everybody upset about and people care. And so just as you saw people wanting to do something about what they called in the late 1800s white slave trafficking. And they reduced the stories to, oh, these French men are coming and recruiting British girls to go, you know, work as shop shop girls in Paris and then they're selling them to Arabs. Well, that was the story. But the complexity of the women's lives, there was a backlash in the in the 1890s when it was found out that a number of those innocent young British women were actually British prostitutes who went to have a different market on the continent. The fact they got sold and mistreated seemed to then kind of bleed out. Fast forward 125 years later and we're in the same situation. We would like to think that everybody who ends up in slavery is somebody who was totally pure, snatched off the street, etc. The reality is, is that these are people that's actually, I think it's the wonder of this is that you're talking about people. And our job as governments then is to actually let them be people, not just let them succeed, but also let them make mistakes, let them do all of the amazing things that people can do. But once you start realizing that, then it gets a lot fuzzier than this very black and white, good and evil type of thing. Because there are a certain percentage of the cases where just as we've seen with whether it's in the Holocaust or whether it's folks that are, you know, following an army because they got kidnapped and then start becoming the girlfriend of the commander or whatever, is that there are survival strategies, there are situations where the profit or the opportunity for advancement outweighs the loyalty to one's fellow victims, you know, all of those things happen. Now, the challenge for a policy maker is how do you then look at that and say, okay, we know that this person was a victim. And now we know that they did some other things. And then how do we credit that? I always think about one of my early cases when I was a prosecutor, there was a young man. So when you graduate from deaf school in Mexico, you're coming out of a state supported cocoon that's basically allowed you to be in the dorms, you're with other deaf people, you're learning how to not only sign but hopefully read and write and do other things, and you get out and it's basically they dump you on the street. And the only people that are going to come around are folks who want you to beg or things like that. There's not a deaf education moving up into post secondary or anything like that. And so for a while there were a couple of, again, young deaf people who were recruiting their fellow classmates, people who were a couple of years behind them, to come up to the United States and to beg on the streets of New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. They'd have pictures of the Statue of Liberty, pictures of other classmates skating at Rockefeller Center around the Christmas tree. And all of these things, look at the life that you're going to have with us up in New York. Up in New York there's two apartments with 60 people living in them in flushings. And if people didn't make their $100 to $120 a day quota on begging, these little trinkets, they'd go out on the subway and they'd have a little thing saying, I'm deaf, please, one dollar. They'd go up and down the, the, the subways. And if they didn't make $100 to $120 a day, they'd get beaten, raped, locked to a radiator with a handcuff, sometimes even shocked with an electric stun gun. And once they finally found, they, two of the guys found a deaf American and Spanish sign and English sign aren't the same, but they were able to finally get their point across. And this guy helped them write a note that they took to the police station. And after two years, they finally, I'm not going to say we liberated them, they, they liberated themselves, but then we were able to help them. While we started hearing stories about what one of the guys had done to the others. And early on, we were like, okay, you know, perps, victims. And this guy is 19 years old, Augustine, big guy. The ringleader, who was a very good looking young woman, had started flirting with him and, you know, do just do this for me and, you know, things like that. And started using him as an enforcer. And other people would look and they'd say, well, we knew how powerful they were because when she had Augustine beat up this other guy, that was his best friend. And we knew that if she could have Augustine do that, that she could do anything. At the end of the day, we were then, we were prosecuting the case. We're like, okay, we know this guy was one of the enforcers. And yet we've got 56 other victims, three of whom are his siblings, who are coming to us and saying, oh my God, you can't, you know, Augustine's not one of them. Augustine's one of us. And so figuring out how, you know, how do you hold him responsible for holding somebody down while they're electrocuting him, while at the same time recognizing that he's a victim. Now in the U.S., we have prosecutorial discretion. And we were able to come up with basically a way to declare him guilty the amount of time that he'd been serving while we were trying to figure it out. Not much on top of that. We even worked with the Mexican so that he could have the same services when he got home that the victims who wanted to go home would receive because we realized he was in that gray zone. Other countries aren't doing that as well. Now what we've seen is just this morning the High Court in Britain, the Lord Chief Justice handed down a ruling on kids that were being enslaved in cannabis grow rooms, Vietnamese children, where he basically said yes, there are drug laws here, but these are trafficking victims. And they need to be treated as trafficking victims, dealing with the fact that the discretion was not being used by the prosecutor. So I think this is one of those things where we have to be able to figure out not just what are these other laws, but even the trafficking law, what's the difference between a perpetrator and a victim? And I think that the younger the victim, the harder it is for them to necessarily resist the opportunity to, you know, maybe if I become the boss's girlfriend, I don't have to be with 10 men every day. And a clumsy law enforcement response looks at her and says, oh, she's the boss's girlfriend, as opposed to why was being the boss's girlfriend logical for her to do. Which brings us in the bigger picture, the complexities that you just hit on it, you know, was it about sort of individual economic insecurity or, you know, at the household level that drives someone to either end up being almost a willing and then victim or to be willing to do this work, to be a recruiter, a pimp or whatever it is. It's a rights issue or a lack of, you know, governance, lack thereof, function of conflict in many countries. So it's very complex. And at the start, one of the things you talked about that affects the way that you're able to sort of do this work and the challenges of being stovepipe. And as someone, you know, that has sort of been engaged on this issue, directly and indirectly, and now having working more directly in the youth space, I see this sort of segmentation, if you will, not only in the way of policy that the country level at national level, but also in the programmatic approach, and even in the movement, and in the movements. In that regard, can you talk a little bit about how you think, you know, government as well as our own government, governments on the ground, NGOs, think tanks, you know, young people, the activists can can help break through these stovepipes to address some of these complexities. I think the stovepiping issue is one of the hardest. And part of it is that most of the institutions that we're having to harness to bring into the fight against human trafficking, exist. So it's not that we're creating an anti-trafficking apparatus, it's that we're going to the child protective services system, who has the thousand things that they have to deal with, and we're saying, oh, well, you know, 300 of your thousand things you have to deal with actually impact human trafficking. Now, if I'm a state child protective services coordinator, and the feds come to me and say, hey, no more, no more money for this, but you need to deal with human trafficking, what I'm hearing is you're taking money away from my foster care system. If I'm a domestic violence shelter provider, and an extreme, and I've been doing it for 35 years, and I'm, you know, worried about how I'm keeping, you know, the keep putting a new roof on the shelter next year, and an extremely enthusiastic and perhaps maybe even naive young anti-trafficking activists come through my door and says, hey, we need to serve trafficking victims, or hey, we need to take some of the VOCA money, which is a victims of crime act. We need to take some of the VOCA money and help trafficking victims. I'm suddenly thinking, who are you, and why are you trying to take away the money from my issue? Same thing in government. You know, if, and especially when you're talking about both the intelligence and the foreign policy communities where we sharpen our elbows on each other so that when we go out into the rest of the world, we are armed to have conflict with other countries. And so that notion of breaking down the stovepipes within the bureaucracies. Well, how do you do that then when the very people who are supposed to break down the stovepipes in those bureaucracies have their own stovepipes, where the Judiciary Committee and the Homeland Security Committee and the Ed and Labor Committee, and I'm just talking on the house side at this point, you know, all are looking at this and saying, oh, well, you know, we look at this, you know, as a labor rights issue, or we look at this as an immigration issue, or we look at this as a severance. And we look at that for our cultural reasons, but we also look at that because Chairman So-and-So doesn't want to see this jurisdiction on something. So I think that's one of the challenges. Now, we have a secret weapon in the United States and she's not a secret to people as to what she does out in public, but I think a lot of people don't realize how much Samantha Power had to do in bringing that stovepiping to an end in the US government. I think that that was one of the real signatures of the last three years, certainly, of her time at the White House was helping us. Now, I'm the head of the interagency by statute. But statutes are not self executing and you have to go out and you have to bring people together and we could certainly have meetings and we did have meetings and we'd set priorities and we'd work together. But it really was when somebody like Samantha Power who understood this, she'd done reporting on this when she was still at Harvard, one of the last pieces she wrote on the New Yorker was about an anti-trafficking group and the work that they were doing in India. So she was already thinking about this and seeing those stovepipes. I think that she was able to look across government and help us on the interagency. And, you know, we had a pretty well working interagency working group to begin with. And now it's pretty formidable. We went from doing okay to I think doing a very good job in bringing everybody together so that now we're in the final stages of say, for instance, a victim services strategy. We've seen over at USAID now a counter trafficking policy new outreach and training coming in at Department of Homeland Security. All of those things. And I'd like to think that it's something that I could have pulled off as the head of our interagency. But without Samantha Power, I don't think that we would have seen the president coming out and saying, not just this is a foreign policy priority, but saying to trafficking victims at his UN speech last year, we see you. I think that's the kind of thing that hopefully we'll be seeing her be able to take up to New York as well. It's a really interesting point. I was at USAID when the counter trafficking in person policy was being drafted and released. And I was working at the time on developing the youth and development policy. And colleagues were also at the same time working on the agency's women gender equality policy and gender equality. And there was a very intentional effort to make sure that we were also all talking to each other, even just from a USAID perspective as well as of course in contact with College of State Department the White House and so on. Because of those issues in the past had been so segmented. But I think the results were positive and there is, when you read those three, just those three even side by side, you do see I think that effort come to bear. Just picking up on this and in the sort of international context, especially because you mentioned Samantha Power. I'm curious, as you probably all well know, as you all know, next in 2015 the Millennium Development Goals are set to expire. And obviously one of the hottest topics in the development discussions right now is the post 2015 agenda. Last month the framework of recommendation went forward to the Secretary General, the initial framework of recommendation. And I quite frankly was surprised to see not one mention of trafficking of slavery. As part of the recommendations now ending child marriage is incorporated as a suggested target within the gender equality goal. But to me that is almost somewhat representative on a global scale of some of the challenges and bringing this issue together. In some way they see similarities to sort of quote the youth issue in that it's I call it home full as opposed to home less. I mean in some ways it's everywhere. But now obviously you've done a lot of leadership in the State Department but how do you see that in that bigger picture? I mean are you surprised by that lack, that missing? Well you know there's a whole series of books and Waldo's in every one of those pictures but you have to look for them. And I think that that's the thing. It's like you know we end up seeing you know the human trafficking situation through these different lenses. What we've seen in a lot of governments is that if it's located in the Ministry of Interior which usually has more throw weight and has the discretion not to arrest or to arrest that something gets done. When it's in the women's ministries, when it's in the development arm, etc. It often gets subsumed to the much larger or what appears to be much larger issues or the issues that get more attention whether it's through the MDG, whether it's through other things. So suddenly and I'm you know when I'm not thinking about trafficking I'm thinking about those other issues but you know if everybody's going to get together for a big international conference on women and corporate boards you're dealing with the very top of the pyramid at that point and then the entire infrastructure starts getting ready for that meeting as opposed to trying to figure out those vulnerable women who are getting put into you know a prison as opposed to a shelter. And now part of that is because a ministry like that doesn't think prisons. They're not fluent in prison. They're not fluent in the difference between illegal alien who's a victim versus undocumented worker who doesn't have a right to be in the country because that's not where they play. And so some countries in fact most countries where we've been able to instead change the approach of the interior ministry to start caring more about vulnerable populations to start caring more about women. They then have the tool kit and they also have the familiarity with the places that trafficking victims end up being abused. And I'm not necessarily just saying the work site or the brothel but also in the immigration detention in the courtroom in places where the victims are not being treated well. Those are places where the justice ministry and the interior ministry tend to be more fluent. Now what does that mean as far as the UN system is concerned? Well there's also even the different parts of the UN that want to help on this are often going in different directions because the ILO, the folks in Geneva at the Human Rights Council, the folks in Vienna at the crime convention, they've all had to be figuring out over the years how do they fit together. And so what happened is and again this is one of the reasons why we have slavery like practices similar to all of these different slicing and dicing is because the Human Rights Council will pass its thing against this phenomenon and across the street the folks over at refugees will do theirs. And so bringing that all together there's a global plan of action that's working at the General Assembly level to try to start to bring that together. But I do think you're right, it's a missed opportunity not only to think about how it fits into the Millennium Development Coals but also how do you make it so development is not simply the business of the quote-unquote soft agencies within a foreign policy apparatus or a domestic policy apparatus but is also the business of the hard agencies. And the United States because of our history of slavery I think that we do that better than many. And when I say because of our history of slavery it's because of the Justice Department, the federal government had to enforce anti-slavery laws and hate crimes laws and police brutality laws in the former Confederate states because it was the county sheriff who was helping to enslave people through debt bondage up until the Supreme Court case of Pollock v. Williams in 1947. It was the county sheriff who was at least looking the other way if not actually the head of the local clan in the 60s when we had our lawyers down there during the Mississippi burning years. And so that notion of federal, not just federal programs or federal development work but federal law enforcement having to enforce civil rights through the coercive power of law enforcement. I think we're very comfortable with that because we had to go through it in a very painful way. I think there's a lot of countries out there that tend to think development, that's those softies, law enforcement, that's those crusties. And the fact of the matter is that there's a heart that wants to help people even with the guy who's carrying a gun. We got to give him a chance. And the development folks need to be brought into the notion that bad guys do need to go to jail. So my last question and then we'll turn over to the audience. I'm picking up on what you said about the missed up, is a missed opportunity. One aspect of that too I think is that with the MDGs, you have a call for data, data in terms of monitoring. And so that sort of leads me to my last question, which I feel I'd be remiss if I didn't bring out is the role of technology. I know that's an area you've done a lot of work in from how technology can be used as a sort of a tool for response, for better data for victim identification. But there are some issues around technology being almost as a tool to promote trafficking. So if you could just sort of say a few words on where you see technology and then we'll open it up for a few minutes of questions. Technology as it is with every other part of society I think it's a double edged sword here. I mean it's a situation where traffickers can not only recruit their victims through the use of modern technology but can actually offer their wares to the public, especially in the situations of sex trafficking more than in labor trafficking. But that notion of a perfect example there was a case in the Netherlands a couple of years ago where there would be kind of a posting saying that certain girls would be coming to your town and you could click on who you were interested in and then it'd switch over to your mobile application. You'd get about and there was kind of like an outlook scheduling thing and it'd switch over to your mobile app and about 40 minutes before your assigned time it would let you know what hotel you were supposed to go to. And so while prostitution is legal and regulated in certain cities in the Netherlands under certain circumstances hotel prostitution and certainly hotel prostitution of enslaved Romanian women is not legal and regulated in the Netherlands. And so what ended up happening is that the Dutch kind of broke into the middle of the technology and started sending text messages to the customers that came up you know text messages will come up even if your phone's not technically on and it's amazing how many Dutch men's wives read their cell phone messages evidently. And the Dutch prosecutor specifically decided you know we're going to send a message you know saying you know your phone number has been identified in a human trafficking ring as a potential client please call us immediately so that we can help rescue them or you know something like that it was very much like hey any wife or girlfriend who reads this you know let us know. Um that's you know to me that's there's like at least four different uses of technology just in that one story. It starts off with I think a very pernicious use of technology and I think that especially as we get a generation who's jumping landline who's jumping even computing and mobile telephony ends up becoming the dominant thing you know I think that that bodes both ill and perhaps well. We're now starting to see you know the US hotline that's administered by the Polaris project with grants from HHS as well as from great support from outside communities is now having not just the phone number 888-3737-888 but also now a text application so that girls who are in that situation who might not be able to actually make that phone that phone call can actually do something by text and we're working with Palantir and with the phone companies and others to be able to then start pinpointing locations in a way that we've never been able to do before. The other thing that's exciting is the notion of being able to break the information monopoly. One of the things that Dr. Golden and I have always talked about is that notion of the trafficking victims are not the most vulnerable they're the spunky ones they're the ones who are going to go and try to help their family that they're going to go and try to have that better life and that's what the traffickers pervert is the gumption that we see with the folks who end up being their victims but one of the biggest differences between the trafficking victim and the trafficker is the information gap. The trafficking victim knows that there's this place that they think that that they can make a better life for themselves in America. They've seen movies about America, etc. They don't know how to get to America. The trafficker is like, hey, let's get on the website and we'll apply for the student exchange program and the trafficker has the information and then when they get picked up at Dulles and I'm talking about an actual case when they get picked up at Dulles by the trafficker and the trafficker says, oh, we're not going to Virginia Beach to work for the summer as a lifeguard. The way that I had told you, there's been some extra charges and the way the program works, we're taking you to Detroit and you're going to be dancing in a club. And so then you have somebody who thought she was coming into a legitimate circumstance here that ends up in a strip club in suburban Detroit. If there's ways to change that information differential, at least after the abuse has started so that the person knows that they can escape and has a way to, like the SMS, then that's great. If there's a way to change the information differential on the front end so that we break the backs of the recruiting aspect of this, then I think we're going to be on a real track to bring that 27 million number down. So with that, we have time for one round of questions. We'll do a speed round. We'll do a speed round. We'll take three, the gentleman in the back. We've got a mic coming. Yeah, Alexander Pamov, RTVI Russian Television International. You talked much about crime. Let's talk about punishment, if you remember further, the Stayevsky. And the question is about sanctions. Under the law, Ambassador, could you please make clear for me, starting from next financial year, sanctions against Russia must be imposed or could be imposed, might be imposed. And if you watch about history of sanctions, maybe countries which already had sanctions imposed by your government about human trafficking. Exactly. We'll take that. We'll do, yeah, we'll stack them up and onto them all. Any other ones? Up here in the front? Oh, sorry. Yeah, let's do this. Up here in the front? The best approach to prosecuting your government through the internet. Time for one more. And I'll take it in pink over here or in the front one. The one minute. Okay. Yeah. We're saying that bad guys need to go to jail, but you also brought up the point that many bad guys are victims themselves. And how does that factor into your categorizing of tears when you're saying punishment versus victimization and how countries, of course, have to prosecute people for bad actions, whether they're coming from horrendous circumstances or not, and how you take that and factor that into the tier categorization. Let's do one more. We'll do one more. Woman in the pink? Hi, Abby Mills, American Federation of Teachers. I wanted to follow up on the last point you were making about kind of closing this information gap and move from the punishment side to the prevention side. And have you seen any best practices, I guess, in terms of education and informing people who could potentially become victims of how to avoid these situations? Okay, I think I'll do them in reverse order. So, first of all, I want to thank AFT and the entire Federation. AFLTIO has been a great partner on this and AFT has been a real strong voice, especially on child labor issues and other things around the world. So one of the answers to that is actually that having access to whether it's unions or less structured groups of other workers is one of those ways. And it's one of the most important ways, I think. We see that, especially in the factory context. A lot of the abuses that you see out there, tragic fires aside because those happen because of a spark, et cetera. But a lot of the horrible situations that you see with mass beatings and confinement and things like that are because people have done what I would call, for lack of a better word, nascent organizing. It's not a full-on organizing effort within a particular factory, but it's the people standing up and saying, something as simple as we want food. You know, we're stuck in this other country. We came here thinking that we were gonna have an opportunity and you've got two chickens for the rice for 100 of us per week. And we're losing weight. We wanna have something different. And that's when the physical violence, that's when the lockdown, that's when the abuse really happens. And so I do think that that notion of more workers' rights, more labor inspectors, more ability to organize, that's a key part of what we think of as prevention. But I think that one of the other things is that is realizing that you have to have a more individualized and targeted method. One of the only things that countries could agree on in the 1904 convention negotiations was that there should be posters put up in waiting rooms for railway systems and steamship lines. That sounds kind of archaic until you realize that 100 years later, one of the only things that most countries can agree on on human trafficking prevention is that there should be posters in airline terminals and railway stations. And if steamships were still the way that we move people, I'm sure they would have agreed on that. What we've heard from folks that are doing the research of escaped victims, especially through the International Organization for Migration, is that there's a surprising amount of folks who recall having seen something when they were at the airport. Of course, by then they've already borrowed the money to be able to pay that unscrupulous recruiter. They've already told all of their friends, and unfortunately when you're talking about some of those spunky, gumption filled youth, maybe they didn't tell all their friends quite as humbly as they should have. When they were saying, hey, I'm going to America, I'm out of here, I'm never going to come back to this one horse town. Well then how do you go back to that one horse town when you suddenly see this poster that says you might be a trafficking victim. You don't go home and admit that you failed to the people who you just had said, I'm bigger than this little place. And that does happen. We hear that from victim after victim. When we say, well, why did you go ahead and get on the plane? Well, I couldn't admit that I was so foolish. I think that we, again, we underestimate those aspects of trafficking because it's cleaner in our mind to think that there's that guy sitting two rows back with a gun making sure that the person doesn't run off. So what we've seen is that the more targeted work, especially some of the things like the BBC program in a number of countries in South Asia, the more it can be like soap opera, like teleplay, things like that, the more that a victim or a potential victim can see themselves in it, but not in that clumsy way. Because what'll happen is they walk by it and they say, oh yeah, I saw that poster about that girl in chains, but A, they're running chains and B, I'm smarter than she is. So I think that that's the limitation of what passes for preventative work in a lot of places. So as far as that kind of differentiating between perpetrator and victim and everything else, I think one of the things that we look to, and this is basically it's kind of to rest defense at its core, is you look to see kind of how much a person was influenced by or had the ability to start to say no. Once somebody starts supervising, once somebody starts supervising without anybody supervising them, once somebody starts profiting from or committing acts of violence against others, they're basically at that point, they're kind of a graduate. They've left being a victim behind and they've chosen to become a perpetrator. And at that point, we'd look at them and we'd say, okay, that is a perpetrator. What we try to do is, at least in the U.S. prosecution context, is to credit, but of how do they got there? And usually, whether it's by letting them plead guilty to misprison of a felony, which is a misdemeanor offense, whether it's something other than the lead offenses, so they'd end up doing less jail time, not charging them at all if we think that they're barely along that journey. But at some point, you do have to say, you have to decide not to rape that person. You have to decide not to hold them down while they're being raped. Even at the cost of you might get hurt, that there are certain lines that you can't cross. Now that's, again, that's very fuzzy. So when we look at the rankings, we typically will look more at kind of the status offenses. Are victims being punished for being illegal aliens? Are victims being punished for being prostitutes? Those types of things which a country should know better, there's not a lot of gray area in there. That's where we typically look at when we're looking at the notion of are victims being inappropriately punished for things that they did as a result of being trafficked. The issue of how we prosecute over the internet, this is something that's only now really kind of clicking into place. We've just for a few years now have we had the fraud in foreign labor contracting provisions of the federal criminal code. And it's only been used a couple of times and typically that's with kind of your bigger, there's a physical recruiting agency in the home country that is doing the lies, that's giving the different contract. One of the big things the unscrupulous recruiters will do is there's a contract that you sign before your wheels up and then there's the contract that you get when it's too late. They say, this is the real contract. And then maybe they'll say, oh, well, this is the contract here in America. This is the American contract, not the Bangladeshi contract. And then the people will be looking and they're like, we don't read English, you know, aha. And so I think that that's one of the things that it's, you know, as far as prosecuting it, it kind of ends up still having to be the same analysis, the same elements of the crime, the same type of shoe leather that it takes to prosecute any particular crime. What we need to do though is to make sure that we're following them, not just physically, but we're following them online as well. And I think that the internet crimes against children, groups and others, both at ICE Homeland Security Investigations and at the FBI give us the capacity to do that. Finally, the issue of sanctions. The sanctions are something that we are starting to look at. The president has 90 days after the issuance of the report. So the clock started the other day and we'll be looking at what is possible and what is in the US national interest. I appreciate the way that you asked the question because it's the, is it will be sanctioned, might be sanctioned, could be sanctioned? The reality is, is that because the president will be looking to see what is in the United States national interest, that there is not currently a decision as to will there be sanctions against those countries that are on tier two watch list, the 21 countries on tier two watch, or excuse me, on tier three. Sanctions can apply to those. The way the law is written is that sanctions are supposed to apply and the president can waive them. And so we then look to see what is in the US national interest as far as those sanctions. The main types of sanctions contemplated by Congress are foreign assistance. That includes both civilian and military assistance. With foreign assistance then comes sometimes that's training, sometimes that's direct cash transfers, sometimes that's programming, sometimes that's the international visitors who come to the United States. What we try to do, and even with the countries that we have the most tense relationships, is we try to keep the radio open. We try to make sure that there's still the educational and cultural exchanges, that there's still the ability to cooperate on medical and humanitarian things whenever possible. So our first stop as we do the sanctions analysis is to try to figure out, okay, where are we with this country on those types of things? What programs are there that would be affected by a decision to apply sanctions as opposed to waive sanctions? Some countries are donor countries themselves and they don't get money from the United States. And yet we still end up having to go through and look at that. Some countries are countries that we do a lot of work with, day in and day out. And I think that you'd mentioned Russia. Russia is a perfect example of that. We're doing law enforcement work together. We're doing work on the military front whether it's with the proliferation issues or otherwise. And we don't want to have a situation where the very things that we need to work on a country with in order to fix the problem that's been identified is somehow then denied the ability to do so through sanctions. And so right now the process has just started. The president will be making a determination in the fall so we can't speculate as to what may or may not end up happening with sanctions. But I will say that the governing ethos that you can see from the way that the sanctions have been applied throughout the years is that we want to have the sanctions under tier three be analyzed in a way that allows us to continue to work with these governments in the shared fight against human trafficking. Ambassador, on that note, I wanted to thank you not only for being here today, but really more importantly for the work that you do, that you have been doing. And I know that you are committed to keep doing. Thank you all for being here. This is a really important conversation. And I think we only scratched the surface and got started today. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Bolton. Thank you. Thanks, Ariel.