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Dancing On The Borders Of Article 4. Human Trafficking And The European Court Of Human Rights In The Rantsev Case., Vladislava Stoyanova

Vladislava Stoyanova

This article points to four worrisome aspects of the Court’s reasoning in Rantsev v. Cyprus and Russia. First, the Court takes on board the concept of ‘human trafficking’ without offering any meaningful legal analysis as to the elements of the human trafficking definition. Second, the adoption of the human trafficking framework implicates the ECtHR in anti-immigration and anti-prostitution agenda. The heart of this article is the argument that the human trafficking framework should be discarded and the Court should focus and develop the prohibitions on slavery, servitude and forced labor. To advance this argument I explain the relation between, on …