The project is co-financed by the European Union. This coming July will mark 15 unflattering years that Israel has been included on the "Trafficking in Persons Report", a report that ranks countries on how they deal with trafficking of women for prostitution. It assess whether countries meet the minimum criteria to tackle the problem in three categories: prevention, enforcement, and rehabilitation. Against the background of globalization and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, large-scale patterns of trafficking developed all over the world, as well as solutions to handle the issue.
These years at the beginning of the 21 st century were marked by intense activity both domestically and internationally around crafting laws to combat trafficking. At this time Israel established two committees: one, a parliamentary inquiry commission and the second, an inter-ministerial team, who were tasked with working side-by-side with the activities of non-profit organizations. In each of the first few years , hundreds of trafficking victims were found to be imprisoned in Neve Tirtza Prison as well as a private detention facility in Hadera.
There was no record that the police were taking any action against the traffickers. The name the police gave to these women were "sex tourists" and the serial number given to them in prison started with the letter P prostitute as opposed to women who were arrested for other criminal activity or were arrested for being in Israel illegally with the letter C criminal.
Victims of trafficking were detained only to testify against their traffickers. Tragically, it seems that many women were detained in prison at the request of their traffickers, to later appear during the legal proceedings as a defense witness. Israel has come a long way since then. At the beginning, as is almost always the case in the struggle against trafficking, work began with a focus on the criminal sector.
Observing trafficking through the prism of the criminal code allowed the creation of common ground and a mechanism that other countries could agree to join. This was helped in large part by the measures set out in the UN Protocol to combat human trafficking.
