The three heterogeneous human rights topics have specific approaches, but are also marked with similarities.
First, it is an issue of rights of certain social groups (women, children), by strengthening and emancipating them and the need for mainstreaming their rights. In women's rights the gender dimension is an essential element. In the field of children's rights, the generation and age dimension are of great significance. Women’s and children’s right play a conducive role in the development of human rights between private entities (obligation to protect).
Human trafficking provides close ties with both protection of women’s rights as well as of children’s rights. Human trafficking means transportation of persons within a country or across borders by means of for example use of force or of deception for the purpose of exploitation.
Human trafficking has attained much attention on the international and European level, however, with modest success. The challenge is to reach a balance between the well developed law enforcement and the cooperation for protection of victim and prevention of trafficking and to provide monitoring mechanisms based on human rights in all these areas.
In cooperation with ECPAT Austria and LexisNexis, the Law Faculty of the University of Vienna and the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Human Rights elaborated two expert opinions on questions concerning assistance to and identification of victims of child trafficking as well as concerning the criminal responsibility of perpetrators.
Sabine Mandl, BIM's women's rights expert, talked with experts on gender, diversity, critical men's studies and development cooperation about a common understanding of gender mainstreaming. You can find a brief german summary about the contributions of the discussion on the website of the Austrian Development Cooperation.
In cooperation with ECPAT Austria and LexisNexis, the Law Faculty of the University of Vienna and the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Human Rights elaborated two expert opinions on questions concerning assistance to and identification of victims of child trafficking as well as concerning the criminal responsibility of perpetrators. The expert opinions are presented at ACTnow - Anti-Child-Trafficking (in German), moderated by Dr. Eric Frey (Der Standard). Manfred Nowak, Helmut Sax and Barbara Weichselbaum are on the panel.
Program and registration can be found here.
The event will be held in German.
Austria ratified the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) in 1982. Since then, Austria has to submit reports on the progress made concerning the implementation of CEDAW. Regularly Austria is examined by the CEDAW Committee, consisting of 23 experts. The most recent dialogue between the CEDAW Committee and Austria took place on Wednesday, 13 February 2013.
Main goal of this project is to tailor the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights ('Ruggie-Guidelines') for the context of Human Trafficking. The guidelines should be implemented in three different sectors: agriculture, construction and the hospitality-sector.
The Children’s Rights Alliance for England (CRAE) recently published a report presenting the views and experiences of over 120 children and young people across Europe on violence in custody and presenting their suggestions for change. The Boltzmann Institute has been national partner for Austria in this project.