Romania Scraps Statute of Limitations for Human Trafficking

A total of 293 of the 332 MPs in Romania's Chamber of Deputies voted on Thursday in favour of removing the statute of limitations for crimes ranging from human trafficking, forced labour and slavery to rape and the sexual abuse of minors, Romanian news website G4Media reported.

The amendment to the criminal code will now go to President Klaus Iohannis for signing and will make it easier to prosecute perpetrators of offences that are unusually common in Romania by EU standards.

The legislative change coincides with the publication of a report by the Council of Europe's Group of Experts on Action Against Trafficking in Human Beings, GRETA, on the situation in Romania.

"Romania remains predominantly a country of origin of victims of trafficking in human beings," the report says, and urges the authorities to tackle such crimes more efficiently.

The report says that "the number of victims identified by the Romanian authorities has been declining over the years". Between 2016 and 2019, the period covered by the GRETA evaluation, the total number of victims identified was 2,613, of whom 74 per cent were female and nearly 50 per cent were children.

"Sexual exploitation remained the most common purpose of trafficking… followed by labour exploitation," the report states.

"Forced begging and forced criminality" come next in the list of most common purposes of trafficking, it adds.

A European Commission report published last October concluded that Romania had the highest rate of human trafficked victims per million inhabitants in the EU, at 74 per million, followed by Hungary, at 64, and Bulgaria, at 40. Most of the victims were women who were subjected to sexual exploitation.

Although far fewer than the number of...