Human Rights: Human Trafficking in the Middle East

The U.S. State Department publishes an annual index on human trafficking practices around the world in an effort to monitor and combat the trafficking in persons. "Trafficking in persons" and "human trafficking" are umbrella terms for the act of recruiting, harboring, transporting, providing, or obtaining a person for compelled labor or commercial sex acts through the use of force, fraud, or coercion.

Human trafficking is monitored as sex trafficking, child sex trafficking, forced labor, bonded labor or debt bondage, involuntary domestic servitude, forced child labor, and the unlawful recruitment and use of child soldiers.

Each country in the world is ranked in one of four tiers:
Tier 1 (Fully comply with minimum standards for elimination of trafficking);
Tier 2 (Do not fully comply with minimum standards but are making significant progress);
Tier 2 Watch List (Do not fully comply, are making progress but number of victims is increasing);
Tier 3 (Do not fully comply with minimum standards & are not making significant efforts to do so)

The following chart ranks the Middle East:

Sources:U.S. Department of State