The EUNAVFOR MED anti-smuggling mission, Operation Sophia, ended in March 2020 and is largely viewed to have failed in its objective of ‘disrupting the business model’ of migrant smugglers in the Mediterranean region. The mission relied on purported enforcement powers in the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and the 2000 Migrant Smuggling Protocol to seize and destroy stateless smuggling vessels on the high seas. Despite repeated claims to such powers by the European Union, neither treaty provides a strong jurisdictional basis for seizing stateless smuggling vessels outside territorial waters. However, ambiguous drafting in the Migrant Smuggling Protocol viably permits some claims to extraterritorial enforcement jurisdiction over stateless smuggling vessels on the high seas, and the European Union has relied on this ambiguity to tackle migrant smuggling. This article argues that the recent European Union anti-smuggling operations, most notably Operation Sophia, have reinterpreted the ambiguous term ‘appropriate measures’ in the Migrant Smuggling Protocol as permitting the states parties to exercise enforcement jurisdiction over stateless smuggling vessels at sea.

This article examines the interplay between transnational criminal actors (essentially human smugglers), local crime groups, and drug cartels in the phenomenon of trafficking in persons coming from Central America along Mexico’s eastern migration routes. The analysis focuses on sex trafficking, compelled labor for criminal activities, and other forms of labor trafficking. Through qualitative research that involved 336 semistructured interviews with migrants, activists, and other persons familiar with the subject, this work describes and maps trafficking trends throughout Mexico’s eastern migration routes. It also sheds light on the role of drug cartels and other crime groups (local and transnational) in these activities.

The objective of this paper, based on interviews with 95 human smugglers (coyotes) involved in agriculture and 51 in prostitution, is to provide a comparative analysis of the networks transporting (mostly) male migrants intending to work in US agriculture and those recruiting women/girls for the US sex industry. Networks carrying females for sex work are bigger and use more fraudulent recruitment strategies. However, migrant smuggling for agriculture is not totally different from sex trafficking; similarities between the types of networks analysed dwarf their differences. Smugglers frequently use some form of deception to convince their would-be clients/victims to undertake risky journeys. I conclude that both networks are demand-driven. Smugglers serve the interests of US agribusinesses and sex business owners rather than those of the males and females they recruit.

This article develops a typology of migrant smuggling. Six generic types of migrant smuggling that were originally produced in the early 2000s are reviewed against more recent empirical findings. These six types were developed in the context of the profound transformation faced by Europe over the course of the 1990s in terms of its geopolitical landscape, when the fall of the Iron Curtain and the dissolution of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia resulted in an unprecedented magnitude of asylum migration, irregular migration flows, and migrant smuggling. Today, in the aftermath of the Arab spring protests and the outbreak of civil war in Syria, the phenomenon of migrant smuggling toward Europe has regained notoriety and relevance. The article concludes that the fundamental mechanisms and types of migrant smuggling that were identified more than a decade ago have persisted over time, but that certain changes in the modus operandi of migrant smugglers can be observed, changes that are linked to geopolitical, market, infrastructural, and other factors.

The general, but false, perception of migrant smuggling through Indonesia, a large, archipelagic country, is that smugglers operate entirely on their own. In fact, the more complex smuggling operations rely on broad networks of foreign organizers as well as local intermediaries and ground staff. In 2011, the Indonesian legislature introduced a severe minimum sentence for any involvement in migrant smuggling with the expectation that the judiciary would apply the sentence in all future cases. However, some judges proceeded to hand down sentences below the statutory minimum, arguing that the punishment is not commensurate to the relatively minor roles played by locals. This article examines how judges at all levels of the judiciary did so in ten related cases. In conclusion, it argues that statutory sentences are not mandatory in Indonesia and that, by applying below-minimum sentences, judges not only maintain judicial independence; they also effectively exercise a judicial review function.