Migration, trafficking and the Greek economy: A comment on ‘the trafficker next-door’

In the early 2000s, Greece’s response to the question of migration took a distinctively punitive direction. In alignment with the global prohibition regime established with the UN Convention on Transnational Organised Crime and its associated protocols on human trafficking and migrant smuggling, the Greek government undertook two key legislative initiatives. Firstly, a new law on organised crime (OC) (L.2928/2001), whose primary focus had previously been terrorism; secondly, a law specifically targeting human trafficking (L.3064/2003), echoing the wording of the UN Trafficking Protocol. The latter law associated human trafficking with OC by inserting trafficking in the list of crimes included in the former, consolidating the connection between migration and OC in public discourse that had gradually emerged throughout the 1990s.