Human Trafficking in Australia
The number of people trafficked into Australia is unknown. Estimates given to a 2004 parliamentary inquiry into sexual servitude in Australia ranged from 300 to 1000 trafficked women annually.
The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Trafficking in persons: global patterns lists Australia as one of 21 trafficking destination countries in the high destination category.
Australia is not a party to the Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others of 1949. It has implemented in 1999 the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children, supplementing the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, to which it is a party. Australia has also ratified on 8 January 2007 the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the Sale of Children, Child Prostitution and Child Pornography, which requires it to prohibit, besides other things, child prostitution. For the purpose of the Protocol, a child is any human being under the age of 18, unless an earlier age of majority is recognized by a country's law. In all Australian jurisdictions, the minimum age at which a person can engage in prostitution is 18 years.
Read more about this topic: Prostitution In Australia
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