Greece's European Union membership, coupled with a shared border with Turkey, meant the country saw massive flows of illegal immigrants looking to enter the EU.
Traffickers also used Greece not only as a destination but also as a transit stop and a source country where even Greek women were prostituted on the way to Western Europe.
[6] The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) defines human trafficking as "the recruitment, transport, transfer, harboring or receipt of a person by such means as threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud or deception for the purpose of exploitation.
[12] According to the 2001 Greek census, there were 797,091 documented foreigners living in Greece, with a large number from Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, and Russia.
[1] Women are brought to Greece from a variety of places, but a large number come from Eastern Europe—a full 50–55% of sex workers in Athens are from former Soviet bloc countries.
[1] From the 1970s onwards, migrants from Asia and Africa began to enter Greece as a temporary stop on their way to other, more developed Western European countries.
[14] Since then, immigration into Greece, legally and illegally, in order to gain access to the rest of the European Union has increased, and traffickers have taken advantage of this as well.
[17] Experts struggle to profile human trafficking victims because they come from a wide variety of countries and backgrounds and experience different forms of economic and sexual exploitation and abuse.
[1] The majority of these women today are from Eastern European and Balkan countries, such as Ukraine, Russia, Romania, Albania, Moldova, Bulgaria, and Poland, but there are a fair number from Africa and Asia as well.
[12] Even after having been freed from entrapping situations, victims may face symptoms consistent with posttraumatic stress disorder as a result of the physical, emotional, and sexual trauma to which they were exposed.
[12] Women freed from trafficking situations face the added danger of a possible return to the sex trade, whether because it is the only life they know or because they are not adequately protected.
[9] Additionally, traffickers use threats, intimidation, and physical, emotional, and sexual abuse to control these women and force them into prostitution.
[9] Greece's European Union membership, coupled with its geographical location between East and West, also contributes to its role as a transit nation in trafficking routes.
[14] An estimated 90% of the illegal immigrants to the entire European continent enter the EU through Greece's border with Turkey; this migration number includes the tens of thousands of trafficking victims.
[1] From 2001 to 2003, Greece was placed on the Tier 3 list of the TIP report, which means the government was essentially ignoring the human trafficking problem.
[1] The government demonstrated clear progress in its prosecution of trafficking offenders, though a high-profile case of trafficking-related complicity remained pending in court as of 2010.
[2] In a positive development in 2009, one active and one retired officer were held without bail pending prosecution for alleged involvement in sex trafficking.
Before 2001, a person who made his or her living from prostitution was liable to prosecution; since then, laws have been implemented that seek to care for the victim and punish the trafficker instead.
[24] In August 2004, a National Action Plan was developed to implement a wide variety of counter-trafficking efforts, including collecting facts and statistics, establishing procedures to identify victims, establish shelters, provide victims with legal recourse, and educating police, judges, and other member of law enforcement.
[24] The Ministry of Health trained nurses, medical admissions staff, psychologists, psychiatrists, and social workers on the identification of trafficking victims.
Greece provided officially-identified trafficking victims with access to legal and medical services through government-run shelters, public healthcare, and intermittent funding to NGOs.
Victims who assisted with law enforcement prosecutions qualified for temporary, renewable residence permits as a legal alternative to removal.
However, some NGOs reported that the coast guard and border police, overwhelmed with processing refugees and undocumented migrants, had little time to use victim identification procedures.
As a result, they sent many potential victims, including vulnerable unaccompanied minors, to migrant detention centers, where they often faced poor conditions.
[2] The Minister for Foreign Affairs spoke out against trafficking, and since October 2009, anti-trafficking NGOs have reported stronger partnerships with high-level officials.
NGOs reported that government grant disbursement delays, onerous reporting requirements, and deteriorating public finances have created financial difficulty for trafficking victim service providers dependent on government funding [2] In 2001, StopNow project was launched to raise awareness and lobby public organizations on trafficking issues.
[1] The Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs works closely with the NGO "Smile of a Child" to implement an amber alert program aimed at helping trafficked missing children.
[2] As of 2012, the Greek government has made important strides in anti-trafficking efforts by tightening legislation and increasing the services and assistance to victims of trafficking in recent years.