Euro Millions Draw Live
Euro Millions Draw Live
UN estimates 270,000 victims of human trafficking living in Europe
THE United Nations (UN) has said there could be around 270,000 victims of human trafficking in the European Union (EU) and urged greater efforts to combat the illegal trade.
The UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) said authorities in Europe were aware of only a tiny proportion of the victims, and estimated that there were 30 times more people affected than were known about.
The disclosure, Agence France Presse (AFP) reported, came on European Anti-Trafficking Day, which aims to draw attention to the plight of victims of the trade who are forced to work illegally after being smuggled across borders.
Antonio Maria Costa, UNODC executive director, highlighted few human traffickers were caught and blamed police for not taking enough action.
Less than one in 100,000 people were convicted for human trafficking in Europe, he said in a statement, adding this was less than “for rare crimes like kidnapping.”
“Perhaps police are not finding the traffickers and victims because they are not looking for them,” he added.
The majority of victims are women who are forced into prostitution, according to the UNODC.
Men are often forced to work on building sites or farms, and 10 per cent of victims are minors, the agency said.
Meanwhile, the EU has used the world’s biggest book fair to launch its bookshop’s digital library, making more than 50 years of documents in about 50 languages available for free on the Internet.
Individuals, companies and isolated libraries from Australia to Zambia can download files dating back to 1952 when six countries created what is now the 27-member EU.
“With the digital library, we have total transparency” of EU legislative and cultural publications, Commissioner for Multilinguism Leonard Orban said.
The project also underpins “the commitment of the European Union to preserve and encourage the history of the union in its linguistic diversity,” he added.
The library’s oldest document is a speech by Jean Monnet to inaugurate the High Authority of the Coal and Steel Community, the EU’s precursor.
From four official languages at its start, the union now counts 23, but some publications are also available in Chinese, Russian and around 20 other languages.
Orban voiced hope that the digital library would be “an additional tool for combating prejudices.”
On a practical level he added: “No one can complain now of problems consulting legislative texts and associated documents.”
Roughly 110,000 publications or 12 million pages – the equivalent of four kilometres (2.5 miles) of bookshelves – were scanned from EU archives from February 2008 at a cost of about 2.5 million euros ($3.75 million).
The library counts around 140,000 publications today, and 1,500 “born digital” ones are added each year. More pre-digital documents will also be scanned into the system.
Topics covered by EU institutions, agencies and other bodies include education, the environment, health and transport, an EU statement released at the Frankfurt Book Fair said.
Official statistics from 1953 to the present are also available.
The library’s contents will also be a part of Europeana, a project of prominent national European libraries and archives that Claudia Lux, president of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions called the largest digital library worldwide.
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