United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime

The United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime (UNTOC) is a 2000 United Nations-sponsored multilateral treaty against transnational organized crime. The Convention was adopted by a resolution of the United Nations General Assembly on 15 November 2000. It is also called the Palermo Convention, and its three protocols (the Palermo Protocols), including a Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children and a Protocol against the Smuggling of Migrants by Land, Sea and Air. The Convention came into force on 29 September 2003. As of January 2015, it has 185 parties.

Julia O'Connell Davidson notes that the U.N. Trafficking Protocol "deems questions about choice, consent, and agency irrelevant where children are concerned. If children have been recruited and transported for purposes of exploitation, they have been trafficked no matter if they consented to move. . . . In the dominant modern discourse of childhood, children are defined by their passivity, dependence, innocence, and vulnerability. Immigrants, by contrast, especially undocumented immigrants, are generally attributed with agency and cunning and supposedly constitute a threat to all that which we hold dear. The child migrant is thus almost a contradiction in terms. In anti-child trafficking campaigning, these two incongruous sets of stereotypes are prevented from coming into collision by establishing that the trafficked child is a real child (submissive and nonagential) and by dis-identifying her from the category of migrant. Unlike migrants, who actively seek to make a better life for themselves or to escape war, disaster, persecution, or poverty, the trafficked child has, object-like, been removed, transported, and put to use. Indeed, migration is frequently explicitly rejected as the background context for the trafficked child's situation, which is reframed as child abuse."