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October 24 – The trafficking of young athletes is one of the dark areas of sport with many governing and governments barely recognising the problem.
On October 21 at a side event at the Third Committee of the 79th United Nations General Assembly at the UN headquarters in New York, the issues will be highlighted under the session title ‘Mobilising against sport trafficking and practical actions’.
It is the third year that sports trafficking NGO, Mission 89, has organised the event alongside the permanent missions of Monaco and Qatar to the UN.
This edition will perhaps have a sharper edge than previous meetings as Mission 89 will launch a paper that gives a clearer definition of sport trafficking that it has developed alongside the University of Loughborough and the Commonwealth Games Association.
Lorena Bright, head of Mission 89, says that at the UN meeting they will be seeking “a buy-in form member states. We have established a working definition and it is now time to build a consensus around that definition, getting states to recognise and use it, We also want to create greater communication between member states to collect and share data that helps everyone address the problem.”
The biggest issue has always been in coming up with a robust definition of what sports trafficking actually looks like. At what point do smugglers become human traffickers – there is a thin line between the two criminal activities. The new report aims to provide that foundation of understanding of what constitutes sports trafficking.
Bright says that it runs far deeper and more entrenched in sports than governing bodies and sports stakeholders generally care to recognise.
For every athlete that is moved to a new country and makes it to the top of their sport (and more athletes are moved between countries in football than any other sport), there are many more who are trafficked but don’t make it and end up in modern day servitude, slavery or even forced to work as…
Source link : https://www.insideworldfootball.com/2024/10/14/sport-trafficking-focus-mission-89-session-79th-un-general-assembly/
Author : Paul Nicholson
Publish date : 2024-10-14 04:58:38
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