Human trafficking feeds on migration, Supreme Court reveals their ‘close link’
The Supreme Court has drawn a close link between migration and human trafficking, which it has described as one of the worst forms of human exploitation. The journey to earn a decent living often becomes a nightmare, mostly for women and even children, the court said.
A Bench of Justices JB Pardiwala and R. Mahadevan highlighted how “systemic inequalities transform a strategy of survival into a path of exploitation”. While not all migration was human trafficking, the latter phenomenon rarely occurred in the absence of migration, the court said.
“For the vast majority of this country’s population, migration is a survival and livelihood strategy; the structural vulnerabilities that drive such movement also create the conditions conducive to coercion and deception… Human trafficking cannot be separated from wider migration flows. Rather, it emerges from within them,” Judge Pardiwala said in a 297-page judgment handed down over the weekend of 29 May 31.
The judgment further addressed the Immoral Trafficking (Prevention) Act or ITPA’s failure to grant rights and protections to voluntary adult sex workers. Justice Pardiwala observed that the law’s silence only reinforced the deep societal stigma against them.
This, according to the court, resulted in voluntary adult sex workers being isolated, marginalized and unable to access the protections otherwise afforded to them by law.
The court said that a meaningful starting point would be for the government to recognize the rights of voluntary adult prostitutes and provide them with adequate protection.
“The rights of prostitutes can exist without the right to sex work,” Justice Pardiwala wrote.
The court pointed out the need for the Union government to re-examine the link between human trafficking and sex work in a legislative framework.
The court said that Section 143 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita requires that for an act of sexual exploitation to amount to human trafficking, it must meet the Palermo Protocol’s three-tiered framework of law, means and purpose. But on the other hand, all sex work was considered human trafficking under the ITPA.
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Section 143 mandates that “the act of inducing a person into prostitution must be done through one of the specified ‘means’ such as violence, coercion, inducement or fraud to constitute human trafficking… The ITPA, on the other hand, operates on a fundamentally different logic.” The ITPA does not require any such “means” such as… Under the ITPA, sex trafficking, regardless of whether it involves third party trafficking, is all prostitution. whether any force, coercion or inducement was used,” the court pointed out.
The court also emphasized that the ITPA tends to harass the very victims it was meant to protect. In addition, the law does not expressly exclude children from its scope. Both these factors need to be examined by the legislature, Justice Pardiwala said.
The judgment said Indian law may not insist on establishing the “means” element in cases of alleged human trafficking if the victim is a child.
“The particular physical, psychological and psychosocial harm suffered by trafficked children and their increased vulnerability to exploitation necessitates that they be treated separately from trafficked adults and therefore makes it very clear that any evidence of fraud, violence, coercion etc. should not be part of the definition of trafficking when the person concerned is a child,” Justice Pardiwala pointed out.
Noting that human trafficking remains largely hidden and only a small fraction of cases come to the attention of officials, the court highlighted how criminal networks are increasingly using cyberspace to snare potential victims while authorities lag behind.
“Cyber commercial sexual exploitation has created a radical shift in the field of exploitation by capitalizing on the anonymity, accessibility and interconnectedness of the digital domain to facilitate crimes with unparalleled efficiency and reach,” Judge Pardiwala said.
Published – 31 May 2026 22:10 IST