President of the consulting commission on human rights (CCDH) Gilbert Pregno issued a raft of recommendations in a human trafficking report published 15 March.
Among them he called for greater powers and resources for agents at the working conditions watchdog ITM to proactively seek out and recognise human trafficking victims.
The thrust of Pregno’s recommendations concern awareness-raising about the types of human trafficking that exist among the wider public, hospital staff, social offices and teachers.
The author wrote that often people associate human trafficking with prostitution, but it can also concern people working in construction, agriculture, catering and people forced into begging by gangs.
“Raising awareness among the wider public and media would be equally important to avoid the dissemination of [trafficking] stereotypes, and hateful and racist abuse of the Romany community in particular,” Pregno wrote.
The report also called for more rigorous detection procedures among people working with asylum seekers, improved conditions in general to prevent them from being vulnerable to traffickers and improved staff training to better identify potential instances of human trafficking.
In the past six years, 79 cases of human trafficking were recorded in Luxembourg, of which 45 were officially recognised by police.
The overall majority were women (66) while 11 were minors. Three quarters of victims (60) were being sexually exploited while just under one in ten (7) was working in catering. There were four people who were trafficked into begging by gangs and three people were working in construction.
Pregno also points out that fluctuations in data on human trafficking should be treated with care since they only represent the cases reported and do not give an accurate overview. To improve reporting, he called for the government to improve coordination between the different services involved in caring for and detecting human trafficking victims in Luxembourg.
His is not the only report to criticise Luxembourg’s handling of human trafficking. The 2016 state department “Trafficking in Persons Report” in the US downgraded Luxembourg to a category 2 for failing to respect the minimal actions to tackle human trafficking.