The Vatican has called for the establishment of a global agency to fight human trafficking.
The comments came at the end of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences’ five-day plenary on modern slavery, entitled “Human Trafficking: Issues beyond criminalisation.”
The President of the Academy, Professor Margaret Archer, told Vatican Radio afterwards that trafficking was tied to the sex trade. To combat it, people who used prostitutes and brothels should be stigmatised in the same way as smokers, she said.
“If we can turn around a habit that is addictive, within 25 years, the way we have for smoking, why can’t we do it for this?”
She encouraged people to organise boycotts of companies that used trafficked labour.
“They’re not organised in the trade union sense,” she said. “They will be not too hard to break, or to damage.”
She revealed that after the plenary she would write a booklet on trafficking, to be circulated to all parishes to raise awareness of the issue.
Earlier this week Pope Francis told the conference, which brought together church leaders and academics, that people smuggling was a “plague on the body of contemporary mankind”, which “constitutes a regression of humanity”.
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