Mohammed Abdel Aziz, Regional Representative of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crimes in the Middle East and North Africa, has linked between trafficking in human beings, especially children, and trafficking in human organs. In a conference titled the Declaration of the World Report on Trafficking in Human Beings, Abdel Aziz said: "Children's organs are sold as if they were spare parts." There is a close relation between the forced labor and trafficking in human beings in the Gulf States, although these countries have shown willingness to amend their legislation to face this phenomenon.
There is coordination between the Office and a number of Arab organizations led by the Arab League to launch an Arab initiative to combat trafficking in humans. Such an initiative aims to unify the ways of dealing with the phenomenon on the legislative level, and promote public awareness about its dimensions, Abdel Aziz said, adding that funding is available.
A committee of coordination between the Egyptian Foreign Ministry and the Regional Office has agreed that the National Center for Social and Criminological Research, in collaboration with international organizations, will prepare a comprehensive study on the issue of trafficking in human beings in Egypt. The report said that 63% of the 155 States, which signed the Protocol, have taken steps either by amending their legislation or updating their criminal laws. 16% of those countries focused on introducing amendments to the laws without issuing new legislations. Children account for 20% of the victims of human trafficking; women, 66%; men, 12%; girls, 13%; and boys, 9%, says the UN Office on Drugs and Crime's Global Report On Trafficking In Persons. There are very few statistics on the number of victims due to the lack of available databases on human trafficking in the world, especially in the Arab countries that have no statistics in this regard. Women are emerging as the pimps of the global trade in humans with a third of the countries reporting more female traffickers than male, the report said.
