In the corridors of Singhdurbar, a comforting consensus has long resonated among the lawmakers of Nepal whenever the dark specter of modern slavery is raised. The refrain is predictable: Nepal’s laws are robust, our penal thresholds are fiercely punitive, and what the country lacks is not legislative text but the administrative political will to implement it.
On paper, it’s an easy argument to make. The 2007 Human Trafficking and Transportation (Control) Act (HTTCA) mandates punishments of up to 20 years’ imprisonment, placing human exploitation on par with the most serious offenses within the national penal matrix. But this constant reassurance from parliament is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what good law is. It combines the harshness of the punishment with the accuracy of the definition, thus creating a profound, systemic disconnect between the statutory language of Nepal and the rapidly evolving mechanisms of transnational crime.
The bleak reality is that Nepal’s anti-trafficking legal framework is not just poorly implemented, it is fundamentally broken. The statutory framework is completely out of step with the contemporary geography of human exploitation, characterising the crime through a medieval lens of physical ownership and forced prostitution.
The state boasts of a 20-year prison sentence for anyone who “buys or sells” a human being, but the international syndicates operating out of cyber-scam compounds in Southeast Asia or labor camps in the Gulf do not buy or sell their victims in a literal marketplace. They use them. They weaponize economic desperation, using deceptive recruitment and fraudulent documentation.
The law is effectively blind to non-sexual, transnational forced labour because the base offence under Section 4 of the 2007 HTTCA does not contain the essential elements of “means” and “purpose”, which are the cornerstones of contemporary human rights jurisprudence. The law creates distinct offenses of “human trafficking” and “human transportation,” a unique legal structure found only in Nepal that breaks the continuity of cross-border cases.
A Nepali prosecutor faces an insurmountable wall of evidence under the anti-trafficking act when a broker cheats a young man in a village in Sindhupalchok, smuggles him across the open border into India and eventually leaves him in an abusive labor camp in Dubai. There is no evidence of an actual sale, nor an intent to exploit sexually.
This narrow view requires a catastrophic legal downgrade. Law enforcement authorities routinely funnel these sophisticated trafficking operations into the regulatory bucket of the Foreign Employment Act of 2007 to achieve any semblance of a conviction. This alternative path reframes a serious transnational human rights abuse as a regular administrative breach of contract. Instead of decades-long prison sentences, traffickers are treated like unregulated or rogue travel agents, getting away with minor administrative fines and a requirement to pay restitution to the victim. A legal system that privileges bureaucratic categorization over human dignity erases the trauma of forced labor, captivity and psychological coercion.
The costs of this legislative inertia are felt well beyond the domestic courtroom. In June 2020, Nepal’s Parliament ratified the United Nations Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children, or the Palermo Protocol, after years of sustained advocacy by civil society. By signing this treaty, Nepal did not sign a declaration of intent but accepted a binding international treaty obligation.
The Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties prohibits a state party from pleading the defects of its own internal laws in justification for failure to perform a treaty. The Palermo Protocol offers a detailed three-fold definition of trafficking in persons: an act (e.g. recruitment, harboring), achieved by a specific means (e.g. threat or force, coercion, abduction, fraud or deception), for an ultimate purpose of exploitation (e.g. forced labor, servitude or removal of organs). Nepal’s failure to fully domesticate this tripartite definition in the HTTCA leads to a huge compliance gap.
Even more troubling, the domestic framework does not clearly distinguish human trafficking from human smuggling. In the newly proposed HTTCA First Amendment Bill, legislators have lumped human smuggling into the definition of trafficking, which is disastrous.
Human smuggling is regarded under international law as a crime against a state’s sovereign borders based upon a voluntary, transactional agreement to circumvent immigration law. Human trafficking, however, is a continuing violation of a person’s basic human rights that is predatory and based on exploitation. By conflating the two, Nepal’s legal machinery often turns victims into criminals, penalizing migrants for irregular border crossings or visa violations instead of rescuing them from systemic exploitation. Nowhere is this isolationism more starkly illustrated than in the changing legal realities of Nepal’s South Asian neighbors.
The sub-continent shared the same stale legacy for decades; trafficking as a crime that was only sex work crossing national boundaries. Yet neighbor after neighbor, in line with international legal and ethical developments, has seen that this antiquated, limited legal regime provides paralysis rather than power to law enforcers.
Take India, for instance. Although India’s pioneering 1956 Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act was focused entirely on sex work, India implemented a judicial and legislative reform. The addition of Section 370 into the Indian Penal Code translated Palermo Protocol definitions directly into domestic criminal law by criminalising labour trafficking, slavery and deception. In turn, Indian law enforcers are able to break down nationally based labor rings that previously operated beneath the local vice-squad’s purview.
Likewise, Bangladesh took a huge leap forward with its Human Trafficking Deterrence and Suppression Act 2012, transforming the anti-trafficking framework into a comprehensive standalone criminal offense comparable to international benchmarks. Most importantly, Bangladesh has legislated specifically around the very problem currently hindering Nepal. It has bridged the gap between fraudulent overseas migration and human trafficking and criminalized the offenses before anti-trafficking tribunals to speed them up.
Even Pakistan has been the subject of criticism for its enforcement but the Prevention of Trafficking in Persons Act in 2018, for example, was an act which carefully unwove migrant smuggling from human trafficking. The experience and ongoing development of laws in these neighboring countries should provide Nepal with a valuable roadmap, as the laws governing criminal enterprises can hardly stay in place as the latter become digitalised, fluid and global corporate bodies.
While the state has repeatedly rescued individuals who have fallen victim to trafficking, this is not enough. The moment of rescue is just the beginning of another painful trauma. Victims often suffer further at the hands of the same state that is supposed to help. Section 13 of Nepal’s HTTCA outlines a basic plan for rehabilitation centers and a fund for institutional support.
However, the reality is grim. Once rescued from traffickers, victims lose their agency and autonomy. They are confined to shelter homes with limited movement. They undergo institutional training programs that rarely lead to real economic independence. The issue is both institutional and societal.
Right now, every interaction a survivor has with state authorities, from filing a police report to seeking help for citizenship or rehabilitation, is filled with humiliation and moral judgment. Officers often question the victim’s status as a victim, focusing on their complicity instead of the state’s failure to protect its citizens. This shaming often leads survivors to stay silent rather than seek justice.
However, we cannot change decades of deep-seated patriarchal discrimination in the bureaucracy just by passing new laws. To improve how the state interacts with survivors, Nepal must go further to build a “Trauma-Informed Bureaucracy”. This means implementing thorough, accredited training on trauma-informed service delivery, not just offering one-off awareness programs. Such training should be a core part of programs at the Nepal Administrative Staff College and the National Police Academy.
Additionally, the Ministry of Women, Children, Gender and Sexual Minorities, and Social Security should set up independent Oversight and Accountability Ombudsman units at the district level. These units should be staffed with civil society experts and public interest lawyers and serve as places where victims can report administrative harassment and abuse of power while still managing their legal cases. A police desk officer or sub-inspector aware of potential investigations or negative marks on their record for mistreating a victim will likely rethink their conduct.
Making laws is not just about words; it’s about protecting people. As long as Nepal’s parliament hides behind outdated punitive laws, they leave the country’s youth vulnerable to complex international crime networks. Following the Palermo Protocol and implementing the National Policy Against Human Trafficking is not just a bureaucratic task for foreign reports or improving international rankings; it is a crucial defense need.
Nepal does not require more laws or better enforcement of existing ones. It needs effective, modern tools to fight against current crime and a compassionate, responsive government, which understands that a victim’s struggles do not end with their rescue but only when they can live freely in their hometown without fear or shame.
