Migrant smuggling and human trafficking are among the most complex and urgent challenges shaping mobility between Africa and Europe. Both crimes are highly adaptive, continuously evolving in response to political, economic, and technological shifts. They thrive on structural inequalities and systemic vulnerabilities fuelled by conflict, socio-economic disparities, discrimination, human rights violations, governance gaps, political instability, and climate shocks. As these conditions intensify globally, they expand both the number of people at risk and the geographic scope where victimization and exploitation can occur.
Although legally distinct¹, smuggling and trafficking often blur along contemporary migration routes, with individuals in situations of vulnerability trapped in cycles of power imbalance, coercion, and exploitation across multiple jurisdictions. The two crimes can intertwine from the outset: individuals embark believing they have secured legitimate employment abroad, only to encounter deception and coercion on arrival. For others, smuggling becomes a gateway to trafficking as dependency and abuse of vulnerability accumulate along the journey. Individuals initially assisted by smugglers may be coerced into exploitation during transit or at destination - by the same networks, affiliated groups, or opportunistic actors embedded in broader illicit economies. Sudden increases in transit fees are also commonly used to impose debt bondage and exploitation in transit or at destination as a means of repayment.
Perpetrators are as varied as the recruitment methods and forms of exploitation they employ. In some cases, the same individuals or networks commit both; in others, unrelated actors exploit the precarious situation of smuggled migrants. Perpetrators may operate alone, while others function within loose or highly structured networks. Some focus only on migrant smuggling or trafficking, whereas others form part of broader illicit economies; including drug and arms trafficking, document fraud, and terrorism. The versatility of these networks allows them to pivot rapidly when law enforcement intensifies; they shift routes, decentralise operations, adapt to technologies, and recalibrate recruitment and victimisation strategies. These patterns reveal not only the diversity of modus operandi but also the consistent exploitation of people’s vulnerabilities, convergence of criminal systems, and growing transnational reach of these illicit markets.
In such volatile contexts, where criminal networks constantly adapt and remain difficult to anticipate over the medium- and long-term, protection becomes a decisive point of influence. Strengthened protection for communities at risk and victims can disrupt cycles of exploitation by addressing the structural conditions that enable these crimes, enhancing the effectiveness of law-enforcement responses, securing prosecution and convictions, and preventing reoffending by signifying the credibility and effectiveness of institutional responses.
1. Addressing vulnerabilities to disrupt criminal incentives
Effective prevention requires recognising that smuggling and trafficking are opportunistic systems that thrive on structural vulnerabilities, and the limited availability of safe and legal mobility pathways beyond labour-mobility schemes or refugee-protection channels. Human rights violations, socio-economic marginalisation, environmental degradation, discrimination, community fragmentation, and conflict create conditions in which mobility become part of survival strategies.
In such contexts, danger is not a deterrent but an accepted parameter of no other viable option. Criminal groups exploit this rationalised tolerance for risk, converting desperation into monetisable opportunity and consolidate operational dominance. Individuals may be vulnerable from a human-rights standpoint, but within criminal markets they represent high-value assets.
Grasping this dual reality reframes situations of vulnerability not only as a protection concern but also as strategic leverage for law-enforcement planning. Combining cross-border action against criminal networks with reducing structural vulnerabilities through development assistance and safe mobility options is not solely a humanitarian priority; it has become a security imperative. Protection mechanisms that mitigate systemic pressures and legal pathways for those with no other solution than mobility, can shrink criminal recruitment pools and weaken the incentives to embark on dangerous routes despite well-known risks or to resort to criminal networks or shadow economies as a survival strategy.
2. Leveraging the knowledge of survivors, diaspora, and local communities
Survivors, diaspora groups, and local stakeholders hold detailed insights on how exploitation unfolds – insights that institutions often struggle to access. They understand how targeting and recruitment occur, which promises resonate in desperate situations, which risks individuals consider acceptable, when coercion actually begins, what forms of pressure maintain compliance, and very importantly, which forms of support may have been preventive. Their testimonies reveal the psychological, socio-economic, and cultural forces that bind individuals to exploitative actors.
Integrating these lived experiences into prevention strategies enables authorities to anticipate risks, rather than react only when people are exploited. When prevention and response are conceived without these insights – and without in-depth understanding of emotional, financial, and social calculations shaping people’s decisions to move – policies may remain technically sound yet operationally ineffective.
3. Broadening Risk Perceptions and Enhancing Victim Identification
A persistent barrier to effective protection and prosecution is the systemic under-identification of victims and at-risk individuals. Many do not self-identify due to trauma, stigma, fear of reprisals, or concerns about legal consequences linked to irregular status or acts committed under coercion. Limited awareness of the principles of non-punishment and non-conditionality further discourages disclosure and entrenches victims in silence; as they often equate reporting of abuses with exposing themselves to criminal proceedings, immigration sanctions, or mandatory cooperation with authorities.
At the same time, frontline actors – border guards, police, immigration officials, and labour inspectors – are not consistently trained in trauma-informed interview techniques or in identifying less visible forms of coercion. Narrow or stereotypical understanding of vulnerability further undermines identification: women and girls are often presumed victims, while men and boys are assumed to have agency; LGBTQ+ persons and accompanied children frequently fall outside conventional profiles. Moving beyond ‘ideal victim stereotypes’ is essential given the growing prevalence of forced labour, forced criminality, and child exploitation which now exceed sexual exploitation in many regions.
Missed identification is not merely an operational oversight; it is a structural failure entrenched in social stereotypes that limits intelligence gathering, hinders the identification of at-risk communities and victims, and weakens prosecution.
4. Fighting Chronic Impunity: Strengthening Justice and Accountability
Improving identification alone is insufficient without parallel capacity to pursue justice. Despite broad international commitments – including the UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime and its Protocols – significant disparities persist in national offence definitions, evidentiary standards, victim-protection frameworks, cross-border cooperation, and prosecutorial capacities. Smuggling and trafficking networks operate fluidly across jurisdictions, while legal and institutional responses remain too often compartmentalised and bound to national contexts only.
While accountability remains the cornerstone of deterring and preventing reoffending, this fragmentation creates zones of operational impunity that criminal groups readily exploit. A lack of accountability does more than leave past abuses unaddressed; it increases the propensity of networks to re-engage in exploitation by signalling lack of institutional capacity or momentum. When successful prosecution rates are low, the cost-benefit ratio tilts in favour of re-engagement, and the likelihood of criminal network expansion increases.
An effective response to migrant smuggling and trafficking requires two sides of the same coin: robust law-enforcement action targeting criminal masterminds and financial structures, alongside sustained protection measures that reduce vulnerabilities and enable victims’ safe participation in justice processes. Neglecting either dimension entrenches cycles of exploitation. When protection and law enforcement work in tandem, criminal incentives weaken, victim trust in institutions increases; eroding the broader ecosystem that sustains smuggling and trafficking.
About the author
Solène Jolly is Project Officer for the Rabat Process. Solène has over a decade of legal and policy experience in international human rights and refugee law, migration and border governance, and disarmament. Previously, she served as Human Rights Officer for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), advising on European and North African human-rights-based approaches to migration and border governance. She also led capacity-building events for States Parties and advised on treaty implementation. at the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW); and served as a Negotiator Adviser at the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs, focusing on the reform of the Common European Asylum System, the EU Pact on Migration and Asylum, and EU approaches to rescue and disembarkation at sea.
¹ Smuggling involves facilitating irregular entry in exchange for financial or material gain, while trafficking centres on the exploitation of individuals through coercion, deception, force, or abuse of vulnerability.