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Human Trafficking

I beg to move,"That this House believes that human trafficking is the modern equivalent of the slave trade, and, while welcoming the Government's commitment to ratify the Council of Europe Convention on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings, regrets that this commitment has been delayed for more than a year since the Conservative Party first asked the Government to take this step, and will not come into effect during 2008; welcomes the forthcoming United Nations forum to fight human trafficking and urges the Government to take further immediate steps to help the victims of trafficking, including new measures to intercept traffickers and victims at our borders, better provision of refuge places, the use of telephone helplines, and a drive for better cooperation among national authorities within Europol and Eurojust, so that the United Kingdom can become one of the leading countries fighting human trafficking." It is good that we are having this debate 48 hours after the Home Secretary made the significant announcement that in the next 12 months the United Kingdom would ratify the European convention on action against trafficking, for a number of reasons. The first is that it was a cause of some national shame that 12 other countries had ratified the convention and we had failed to do so. The second and most important is that it may mean that the Government will stop merely talking a good game on action against trafficking, and will actually live up to their rhetoric. The third is that it shows that parliamentary opposition can have some effect in shaming a Government into doing what they know they ought to do. It was in January 2007 that we first urged the Government to sign the convention and to take a number of other actions against the appalling trade in human beings. In March they signed the convention, and made some other efforts against trafficking which we welcomed. By January this year, we thought that the process had become alarmingly slow, so two weeks ago we returned to our call for action, this time for ratification of the convention, and last week we decided to hold this debate. Two days ago, the Home Secretary said what we wanted to hear and we welcomed it, as we do in the motion. Better late than never is the appropriate phrase to describe the Government's performance on the matter.