The US State Department Tuesday released its annual Trafficking in Persons Report which held China and 10 other countries responsible for enabling the practice of human trafficking within their borders. The report surveys and evaluates the trafficking prevention efforts of 188 countries, and US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken estimated that 25 million people remain victims of trafficking across the globe.

The Trafficking and Violence Prevention Act of 2000 (TVPA) requires the State Department to evaluate the efforts of governments to combat trafficking and generate a “focus on corruption and complicity.” According to the TVPA, the US recognizes forced labor and sex trafficking as two primary forms of trafficking in persons.

In 2019, the U.S. Congress amended the TVPA with increased provisions to monitor and set minimum standards for the actions of other governments to combat trafficking. This year’s report was the first to add a section on state-sponsored trafficking and identified the 11 governments of Afghanistan, Burma, the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Cuba, Eritrea, Iran, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Russia, South Sudan, Syria and Turkmenistan as having a “documented policy or pattern” of trafficking and human rights abuses. In the context of the war in Ukraine, Russia was listed amongst countries employing child soldiers.

The report identified five topics of special interest “of grave and urgent concern.” These included forced labor through the PRC’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the transition to clean energy in global supply chains, exploitation related to the climate crisis, better integration of data collection by governments on human trafficking, and efforts to combat corruption related to trafficking.

The State Department held China responsible for “state-sponsored forced labor programs targeting predominantly Muslim Uyghurs and members of other ethnic and religious minority groups, amid the ongoing genocide and crimes against humanity” in the production of silicon metal for global supply chains in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. The report also identified the country as allowing sex trafficking and work-related abuses to continue in BRI worksites. 

The displacement of refugees as well as women, children, and marginalized social groups due to climate change also emerged as a growing concern in the report. The UN estimates that climate change and natural disasters can increase trafficking by 20-30 percent.

At the report’s launch ceremony, Blinken said:

The United States is committed to fighting [trafficking in persons] because trafficking destabilizes societies, it undermines economies, it harms workers, it enriches those who exploit them, it undercuts legitimate business, and most fundamentally, because it is so profoundly wrong.