Researching Human Trafficking? There are two great case law databases publicly available online.
Human Trafficking Law Project (HTLP) Database, launched in February 2011 by the Human Trafficking Clinic at Michigan Law School, is a publicly available database of human trafficking cases within the United States. The database is fully searchable even though it does not employ Boolean search capability. As such, searches using AND, OR, and NOT will not work. But, the retrieved results can be effectively filtered by either a case name, year of verdict, type of court, type of case, or when it was last modified. To help users sift through the retrieved results, the database editors assign case categorization for each verdict (i.e. military contractor, domestic servant, commercial sexual exploitation, prostitution, pornography, etc.) identifying major issues of each case. Additional tips on how to use the HTLP database are posted online.
UNODC Human Trafficking Case Law Database, created and maintained by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, offers almost 1,000 case briefs from 80 different countries and two supranational courts. Case law can be browsed by either a country or by keywords, or case law can be searched. Countries are listed in alphabetical order and can be filtered by the name of the country. Keywords are divided into six major categories: acts, means, purpose of exploitation, international cooperation, form of trafficking, and sector in which exploitation takes place. When searching case law, retrieved results can be further filtered by: country, decision/verdict date, sentenced date, victim’s nationality, victim’s gender (including the child category), defendant’s nationality, defendant’s gender, verdict, appellate decision, court, legal system, latest court ruling, type of court/tribunal, and keyword. Users may subscribe via RSS feed and be informed every time a new case brief is added to the database. Visit the FAQ section for more information about the database.
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