Democracy, Human Rights, and Trafficking
April 2026 GLC Monthly Learning Call Brief
Democracy, Human Rights, and Trafficking: Working With What We Have
Key Learning Points from our April Calls:
Trafficking thrives where governance is weak, corrupt, or captured.
Democracy, when it works, disrupts the conditions traffickers depend on.
Even strong democracies fail without transparency and active accountability.
The same core struggles surface everywhere: corruption, fragmented policy, and constrained advocacy.
Real advocacy traction is often found informally, on a local level, with motivated individuals, not high-level committees.
In constrained contexts, advocacy adapts: quiet networks, anonymous reporting, long-horizon strategies.
Multi-pronged legal approaches through aid, training, research and litigation, can move the needle even in difficult systems.
When resources shrink, collaboration quality matters more, not less.
Survivor voice is a practical tool, not just a principle.
Persistence and courage are necessary, though unsustainable alone; they require community and attention to and care for capacity.
Introduction
A concept that rose up in the exploration of the topic this month was of ‘both-and’. The government can be a source of protection, and it can encroach upon the very rights it is supposed to uphold. Democracy is an essential framework for combating trafficking, and it is an imperfect and at times deeply frustrating political reality. Advocacy requires individual persistence and courage, and it must be sustained within community with honest attention to capacity and care for self. It felt like the defining ‘outcome’ of these calls was a communal exhale, as we appreciated our active holding of the complexity of the intersecting aspects of the systems we have to work within, without collapsing any of it into easy conclusions.
The Eastern call featured:
Cherisse Francis, from St. Mary's University Twickenham, UK;
Mamisoa Raveloaritiana, Voice for Democracy and Justice and Association Mamynysoa, Madagascar;
Shelmith Gatwiri Maranya from Amka Africa Justice Initiative, Kenya
The Western call featured:
Angie De Luna from A21 Latin America, Mexico;
Caleb Stewart from Rocky Mountain Immigration Advocacy Network, USA;
Claudia Deschamps from El Pozo de Vida, Mexico
What We Learned and Discussed
What trafficking has to do with democracy — and why it matters
The GLC has been circling the topic of the intersections between human rights, democratic governance, and trafficking from various angles in different conversations for some time. ur April Monthly Learning Calls brought this into sharper focus. Cherisse Francis opened the Eastern call by grounding the discussion in a foundational observation: trafficking is both a cause and a consequence of human rights violations. It flourishes where the structures that are supposed to protect people - legal systems, governance institutions, enforcement mechanisms - are weak, corrupt, or captured by interests other than those of the most vulnerable. Strong democracies create conditions where laws can be enforced and survivors can access protection; weak ones generate the impunity and silence that trafficking networks depend upon.
On the Western call, Angie De Luna highlighted the same dynamics, framing democracy not merely as a political arrangement but as a network of protection, one that when functioning, can create the transparency, accountability, and civil society engagement that make trafficking harder to sustain. Traffickers, she pointed out, do not actually require chaos to operate but specific conditions: poverty, vulnerability, corruption, and low risk of punishment. Democracy, when it works, disrupts those conditions. When it doesn't, those conditions are left to compound.
Both calls also raised important reminders for all, that democracy is not a given which once achieved, maintains itself. It requires active tending. And that even then democracy does not always work — and that all who are doing this work are navigating this reality on the ground in various ways. Democracy is not a given that, once achieved, maintains itself. It requires active tending.
Shared struggles, different contexts
A notable feature of both calls was how all our contributors, though from very different national and regional contexts, identified the same core challenges: corruption that undermines legal and institutional processes, policy frameworks that fail to cooperate across sectors or types of harm, difficulty finding and sustaining an advocacy voice, and the particular vulnerability of children within systems that are supposed to protect them — but that rarely do so coherently. Claudia Deschamps reflected specifically on the complexities of supporting children, and the piecemeal nature of policy frameworks around them - children needing their identity protected but not being permitted into education without disclosing their details. Highlighting the difficulty of working within systems that don’t have the people who need them most at the centre.
Mamisoa Raveloaritiana’s account of Madagascar's political environment also illustrated this - frequent disputed elections, weak institutions, corruption eroding public trust particularly in rural and impoverished areas, and the difficult work of advocacy in a context where formal channels don’t really exist or function well. Her practical strategies for working in this environment such as closed-door meetings, anonymous publication of sensitive reports, building dense networks across organisations, journalists, and embassies, were a reminder that advocacy in constrained contexts requires a different kind of approach where formal channels are closed. In some countries, advocacy itself is not permitted. And yet the work continues. One such perspective was shared about the context of Hong Kong, where the 2020 security law ended formal advocacy entirely, and their advocacy strategy has had to shift to youth education and narrative change — as a longer-horizon approach and the only viable path forward.
Sharing about Kenya's context, Gatwiri Maranya from Amka Africa Justice Initiative, offered a different picture — not of total constraint but of a legal and advocacy space that exists alongside significant structural challenges. Their model, integrating legal aid, mentorship of law students, research, and policy advocacy, represents a comprehensive contextually appropriate response to a complex environment in which Kenya functions simultaneously as a source, transit, and destination country. Their work securing compensation for survivors, training hundreds of duty bearers and paralegals, and filing constitutional challenges to problematic child labour provisions is a powerful example of what sustained, multi-pronged legal advocacy can achieve.
In the Western call, Caleb Stewart's presentation on immigration legal services in the United States brought into focus just how quickly systemic conditions can shift. T visa processing times have extended beyond two and a half years, with over 45,000 applications pending against a statutory cap of 5,000 approvals annually, and federal funding for legal services faces a projected collapse from sixty-five to less than ten percent of current levels. These represent a fundamental contraction in the support infrastructure for survivors at precisely the moment it is most needed. The response has been creative: strategic coordination across organisations in Colorado, each focusing on its area of specialisation rather than duplicating effort, and broader multi-state partnerships to share expertise and mount litigation against restrictive policies — perhaps an example of how when resources shrink, the quality of collaboration becomes more important, not less.
The courage to advocate — and what sustains it
Mamisoa's advice for human rights defenders, when asked on the Eastern call what she would offer to others doing this work, was disarmingly direct: Be persistent. Be courageous. Maintain your integrity.
Mamisoa’s words were a powerful reminder of what is necessary in our work in so many contexts. The Secretariat team reflected afterwards however that this requires more than reliance on self, as we acknowledged that the demands of persistence and courage has led many of us doing this work to burnout and ultimately to step away from the work. For persistence and courage to be sustained it has to be accompanied by an equally serious commitment to capacity, community, and care for self, as previous community learning and conversations has raised. This is what makes courage possible over time. The systems and structures that trafficking operates within are vast, and they are not changed by any one person or organisation working alone. We tell ourselves this all the time. Courage, in this sector, has to be found and sustained within the community because the work itself demands it, and because the costs of going it alone, for too long, are real.
Raised on both calls was also the matter of where to look for traction within government structures. Cherisse noted that high-level government committees often lack genuine commitment — members appointed by title, offices that exist primarily to satisfy international reporting requirements. But junior officials and frontline staff frequently hold more practical knowledge and more genuine motivation. Call attendee Katie Modrau (A21 South Africa) shared about their having informal conversations among passionate individuals, in provincial government assigned task teams, that seeded real initiatives — a useful reminder that the most meaningful points of leverage are not always where the institutional chart suggests they should be. Building relationships with people inside the government who share a commitment to the work, even quietly, even imperfectly, is its own form of advocacy.
Implications for the GLC
There were clear threads from this call running back to various topics in our community learning, and as the immensity of the work was once again brought into sharp focus we thought it was particularly important to remind the community about our various calls on burnout, resilience in chronic high-stress systems and sustainable self-care practices. This trauma, which we’ve looked at from various angles before (read about our 2025 Trauma in Context call), was also present in this month’s discussions — in accounts of people who have migrated and ended up in detention, in survivors navigating legal systems not designed around their needs, in advocates working in high-risk environments. April’s calls modelled a community holding this complexity together, drawing on shared experience across radically different contexts, once again a reminder of what the GLC was envisioned to be: a human-centred community of support for those doing this often very hard work, in hard places.
Sign in to the Members Area to watch the April call recordings. If you are not yet a member of the GLC and are interested in the calls or joining, email the Secretariat Team at team@globallearning.community, or read more about membership at globallearningcommunity.org/joinus.