Conflict, natural disasters and other crises, especially when accompanied by forced movement (often large scale and protracted) of groups of people, leads to or exacerbates the vulnerability of affected populations. Displacement creates opportunities for both human traffickers and migrant smugglers to:

  • Take advantage of people in an already vulnerable situation to promote their illegal smuggling services.
  • Take advantage of the State’s weakened capacity during crisis for immigration and border management.

In a crisis context, resorting to smuggling might be the only way for migrants who urgently need to flee their home and seek safety elsewhere. However, smugglers engage in a diverse range of criminal activities across a variety of networks, sometimes committing additional crimes alongside smuggling, and other times partnering with other criminals, including traffickers of drugs, weapons and people (Mixed Migration Centre [MMC], 2018: 111). For this reason, people who turn to smugglers to flee crises are particularly vulnerable to being trafficked or falling victims to other crimes.

The key challenge and objective in responding to smuggling situations in the context of conflict and crisis is to identify measures that address the crime without denying those who rely on these services the opportunity to leave the crisis setting. This balance can be achieved through humanitarian border management (HBM).

Glossary
humanitarian border management

Border operations carried out before, during and after humanitarian crises which trigger mass cross-border migration. It aims to improve preparedness of border authorities to respond appropriately to cross-border movements arising from both natural and human induced-made disasters, in a way that protects crisis-affected migrants and guarantees their human rights and interests, while respecting national sovereignty and security.

Policy Approaches
Mitigating the smuggling of migrants through humanitarian border management
  • Gather information on movements, and effectively and securely share that information with other relevant actors, including the United Nations.
  • Create safe and legal pathways for people in crisis to leave crisis areas.
  • Adopt ad hoc legislative, administrative and operational frameworks to ensure that the human rights of crisis-affected migrants are respected, while at the same time respecting national sovereignty and security.
  • Strengthen the capacity of immigration and border management agencies to identify smugglers and smuggling flows across borders.
  • Consider establishing a rapid response team of officers trained in humanitarian border management (HBM) procedures that can be deployed to borders.
  • Develop and implement measures to address context-specific challenges in identifying smuggled migrants, smugglers and related modus operandi.

Read more on humanitarian border management in Chapter Regulating migration: Border management.

To Go Further
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