Vatican City, December 13th, 2019 - The Summit of African Women Judges and Prosecutors on Human Trafficking and Organized Crime convened a group of 50 women leaders engaged in the critical legal fight against human trafficking and organized crime across the African continent. The summit, a continuation of previous meetings in 2017 and 2018, met to propose strategies to enforce and accelerate the impact of their work.
The Pontifical Academy of Sciences hosted the two-day summit with support from the Blue Chip Foundation. Pope Francis addressed the assembled legal practitioners with remarks that denounced human trafficking as “the worst form of human exclusion,” and “evidence of the globalization of indifference.”
Participants identified key challenges that undermined their work, shared best practices for prosecuting and convicting traffickers, and strategized with religious leaders, philanthropists, and academics to build strong legal frameworks for combatting the scourge of human trafficking.
Judith Wanjala, a summit participant and the chief magistrate in Nyahururu, Kenya, spoke to the scale of the challenges addressed by the group:
“I think it is important for everybody to understand what trafficking is, because it affects almost every aspect of society, not just as women but the entire judiciary, prosecutors, police, investigators, and the public.”
The December meeting is the fourth such summit to convene at the Vatican. As an outcome of the previous summits, participants formed a trafficking-focused, pan-African committee of female African prosecutors and judges. At the close of this most recent summit, the Committee issued a resolution asserting its members’ shared commitment to combatting human trafficking and overcoming the relative inaction of governments and the global community to assume responsibility for this issue.
