The Palermo Protocol's Effectiveness in Armed Conflict Contexts

This thesis analyses the effectiveness of The Protocol to Prevent, Suppress, and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children in combating trafficking in persons in context of armed conflict. Using the transnational legal process model, deterrence and rationalism theories, we hypothesized that the Protocol's punishment mechanism, has a twofold effect: a national criminalization system improvement at the state level and a deterrence effect on potential traffickers, resulting in increasing the convictions and decreasing the number of victims. These hypotheses were tested through a comparative case study of two countries involved in non-international armed conflicts: Thailand and Ukraine. First, we compare both nations in the same year, 2016, using the Most Similar System Design method. Following that, we examine each country before and after Protocol ratification. The data confirms partially Hypothesis 1 and Hypothesis 2. We found that the Protocol has short-term and long-term effects. The short-term effect is focused on the states, while the long-term effect is centered on deterring traffickers. In the short run, states' criminalization mechanisms will improve, resulting in more convictions and victims detected. In the long term, both dependent variables decrease owing to the deterrence effect on potential traffickers and the countries' more developed criminal systems.