The United Nations on Thursday called on governments to enforce relevant international agreements aimed at combating the scourge of human trafficking, Xinhua reported.
The appeal was made in the world body's Global Report on Trafficking in Persons issued by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), which provided the first global assessment of the scope of this scourge and what is being done to fight it.
The report said that enforcement, including the number of convictions, is increasing, but denial and neglect continue to undermine the fight against human trafficking.
The number of member states seriously implementing the UN Protocol against Trafficking in Persons, the foremost international agreement in the area which entered into force in 2003, has more than doubled from 54 to 125 out of the 155 states covered.
But, there are still many countries -- particularly in Africa -- that lack the necessary legal instruments or the will to do so.
"There are strong international agreements to ensure that people's lives are not for sale," said UNODC Executive Director Antonio Maria Costa. "I urge governments to enforce them."
Despite increasing convictions, most countries' conviction rates rarely exceed 1.5 per 100,000 people, which is even below the level normally recorded for rare crimes like kidnapping in Western Europe.
The report showed that two out of every five countries covered had not recorded a single conviction as of 2007 and 2008.
"Many criminal justice systems belittle the seriousness of this crime," said Costa. "Either these countries are blind to the problem, or they are ill-equipped to deal with it, or both."
According to the report, the most common form of human trafficking is sexual exploitation, predominantly of women and girls.
Surprisingly, women make up the largest proportion of traffickers in 30 percent of the countries which provided information on the gender of traffickers.
Female offenders have a more prominent role in trafficking in persons than in any other crime. In Eastern Europe and Central Asia, females account for more than 60 percent of convictions for trafficking in persons.
Forced labor, which is less frequently detected and reported than trafficking for sexual exploitation, is the second most common form of human trafficking, the report said.
"How many hundreds of thousands of victims are slaving away in sweat shops, fields, mines, factories, or trapped in domestic servitude? Their numbers will surely swell as the economic crisis deepens the pool of potential victims and increases demand for cheap goods and services," the UNODC head said.
While almost 20 percent of all trafficking victims are children worldwide, in some parts of Africa and the Mekong region, children are the majority, up to 100 percent in parts of West Africa, according to the report.