What Makes it Human Trafficking? How Understanding Our Ability to Recognise Human Trafficking Provides a Rational Basis for Expanding the Scope of the Palermo Protocol

There is something about human trafficking that enables us – regardless of our experience or education – to almost immediately recognize which ones are simply acts of kidnapping or prostitution and which ones involve human trafficking. This article considers why this occurs and the impact that understanding the basis for our recognition can have on the international legal framework for combatting human trafficking. To the first, Aquinian metaphysics provides a way of understanding why this recognition of human trafficking occurs through the lens of substance and accident: our recognition of human trafficking is grounded in our perception of the essential nature, the substance of human trafficking. The article then turns to the Palermo Protocol, the basis for the international legal framework for combatting human trafficking, examining the need for an analytical approach grounded in substance and accident due to the fundamental dependence of the Protocol’s definition of human trafficking on a non-exclusive list of examples (as opposed to articulating specific criteria). The article concludes by proposing that the substance of all the Palermo Protocol’s examples – and thereby human trafficking – can be best understood through Nussbaum’s articulation of objectification, the process by which a person becomes an object. Such an approach allows us to understand our ability to recognize human trafficking and provides a rational basis for identifying human trafficking beyond the listed examples of the Protocol.