The 2025 Trafficking in Persons Report defines human trafficking broadly as sex trafficking and forced labour. Photo: Unsplash / RNZ composite
New Zealand and eight Pacific Island nations are failing to stop human trafficking, a new United States Department of State report has found.
The 2025 Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report, which involved 185 countries, defines human trafficking broadly as sex trafficking and forced labour.
Under the US Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 (TVPA), severe forms of trafficking are defined as:
- Sex trafficking where a commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud, or coercion, or in which the person induced to perform an act and is under the age of 18.
- And the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for labour or services, through the use of force, fraud, or coercion for the purpose of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery.
More than 180 nations have ratified or acceded to the UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons (2000) - commonly known was the UN Protocol - which defines people trafficking includes obligations to prevent and combat the crime.
The TIP Report divides countries into four tiers, one being those whose governments meet the TVPA's minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking.
Governments which are ignoring the Act's standards completely fall into the last tier - Tier 3.
The US ranks itself in the top tier, along with 32 other countries, including Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Iceland, Korea, Sweden, Taiwan and the United Kingdom.
Tier 2 includes Indonesia, the Marshall Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia, New Zealand, Palau, and Tonga. Other countries named include Angola, Bangladesh, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Columbia, Egypt, Ethiopia, Greece.
According to the report, governments in Tier 2 do not fully meet the Act's minimum standards but are making significant efforts to bring themselves into line.
Fiji, the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu rank worse, falling into the tier 2 watchlist. Others on the list include Algeria, Barbados, Kyrgzstan, Nepal, Rwanda, South Africa, Turkmenistan and Zimbabwe.
This means the estimated number of victims of severe forms of trafficking is either very significant or is significantly increasing and the country is not taking proportional concrete actions, the report states.
Or there is a failure to provide evidence of increasing efforts to combat severe forms of trafficking in persons from the previous year, including increased investigations, prosecutions, and convictions of trafficking crimes, increased assistance to victims, and decreasing evidence of complicity in severe forms of trafficking by government officials.
Papua New Guinea slides further to Tier 3, along with countries including Afghanistan, Cambodia, China, Cuba, Iran, Nicaragua, Russia, Syria and Venezuela.
These are countries whose governments are making no real effort to meet the Act.
Additional factors that determine which category countries fall into include whether the country is a country of origin, transit, or destination for severe forms of trafficking, or whether the country's government does not meet the Act's minimum standards and, in particular, the extent to which officials or government employees have been complicit in severe forms of trafficking.
Where there are any reasonable measures that the government would need to undertake to be in compliance with the minimum standards in light of the government's resources and capabilities to address and eliminate severe forms of trafficking in persons whether:
- The government is devoting sufficient budgetary resources to investigate and prosecute human trafficking, convict and sentence traffickers; and obtain restitution for victims of human trafficking; and the government is devoting sufficient budgetary resources to protect victims and prevent the crime from occurring.
The report states 13 countries had state-sponsored trafficking, including sexual slavery in government camps, the employment or recruitment of child soldiers and forced labour in government-affiliated medical services or other sectors.
They are Afghanistan, Belarus, Burma, Cambodia, China, Cuba, Eritrea, Iran, The Democratic People's Republic of Korea, Russia, South Sudan, Sudan and Syria.
Countries in the report that were not party to the UN Protocol include the Marshall Islands, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Tonga and Vanuatu.
The Department of State prepared the report using information collected from US embassies, government officials, non-governmental and international organisations, published reports, news articles, academic studies, consultations with authorities and organizations worldwide.
