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Trafficking¹ in human beings is gross.² It constitutes one of the most egregious violations of human rights.³ The vile nature of human trafficking is also hinged on the fact that it commodifies human beings. Hence its categorisation is modern slavery.⁴ So much of trafficking activities follow the pathways5 of other transnational forms of organised crimes and irregular cross-border movement of people.6 In response to this egregious crime, several international, regional and country laws and instruments have been used or proposed for combatting human trafficking.7 These instruments forbid trafficking in human persons and provide several preventive measures, prosecution of perpetrators and protection of victims of human trafficking.8 The number of state parties to the United Nations Protocol to prevent suppress and punish trafficking in persons, especially women and children, supplementing the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime (the Palermo Protocol), demonstrates the global commitment to combatting human trafficking. However, the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on legal systems, and the capacity of both state and private institutions to combat human trafficking, has added a knotty twist to the global problem of human trafficking. This essay looks at the trends of human trafficking in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. It also highlights international law and policy approaches that state parties and civil society organisations should adopt to counteract the changes and sustain the fight against human trafficking. Thus, the essay contributes to updating the legal and policy approaches to combat human trafficking in this era.

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the ‘real’ world and substantially impacted the virtual world and thus the Internet ecosystem. It has caused a significant exogenous shock that offers a wealth of natural experiments and produced new data about broadband, clouds, and the Internet in times of crisis. In this chapter, we characterise and evaluate the evolving impact of the global COVID-19 crisis on traffic patterns and loads and the impact of those on Internet performance from multiple perspectives. While we place a particular focus on deriving insights into how we can better respond to crises and better plan for the post-COVID-19 ‘new normal’, we analyse the impact on and the responses by different actors of the Internet ecosystem across different jurisdictions. With a focus on the USA and Europe, we examine the responses of both public and private actors, with the latter including content and cloud providers, content delivery networks, and Internet service providers (ISPs). This chapter makes two contributions: first, we derive lessons learned for a future post-COVID-19 world to inform non-networking spheres and policy-making; second, the insights gained assist the networking community in better planning for the future.

Inequality of rights, wage gaps, and gender stereotypes are the context in which women in Latin America live, aggravating their situation of poverty. Under this scenario, drug trafficking is presented as a legitimate job offer as an answer to women’s economic needs. Currently, drug trafficking not only categorizes women as merchandise for sexual services but also integrates professional, technical, and logistical services within the criminal structures.

This research follows a qualitative methodology, making a documentary review to identify the role of women in drug trafficking. As partial results, it is evident that women recognize that gender gaps are not solved by their insertion in the drug trafficking economy, because they must perform jobs that put them at greater risk with the authorities, but they do solve an economic need.

This chapter provides an overview of the potential use of Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) and associated artificial intelligence (AI) techniques in the land transport sector in an attempt to achieve related United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) targets. ITS applications that have now been extensively tested worldwide and have become part of the everyday transport toolkit available to practitioners have been discussed. AI techniques applied successfully in specific ITS applications such as automatic traffic control systems, real-time image processing, automatic incident detection, safety management, road condition assessment, asset management and traffic enforcement systems have been identified. These methods have helped to provide traffic engineers and transport planners with novel ways to improve safety, mobility, accessibility and efficiency in the sector and thus move closer to achieving the various SDG targets pertaining to transportation.

This chapter provides an overview of the internal airline market in the Maghreb and examines the determinants of intra-Maghreb air traffic flows. Most accounts of recent developments in the air transport markets in Africa have focused on the Continent as a whole and to some extent on Eastern and Southern African countries. Previous analysis of air transportation in the Maghreb has involved origins and destinations outside of the region. The analysis of domestic and intra-Maghreb traffic shows that the greatest share of traffic is concentrated on routes linking capital cities and commercial centers. Most intra-Maghreb flights are indirect, with some domestic and intraregional flights transferring through European airports. Here, a gravity equation is used to estimate the volume of traffic between Maghreb countries in relation to a wide set of factors. The results suggest that key determinants of air intra-Maghreb air traffic demand are generally in line with findings in other markets, including those involving GDP, fares, conflicts, visa openness, trade, and the quality of airline services.

Brazil occupies third place in the world ranking in terms of the prison population in the National Penitentiary System, reflecting a policy of zero tolerance and mass imprisonment of citizens in conditions of vulnerability. Even though incarcerated women are a minority group in Brazil, there is an increase in the percentage of them being subjected to criminal control. According to the latest official data, the number is approximately 38,000 women, representing an increase of 675% between 2000 and 2016 – which puts Brazil in third place among those countries that most imprison women, behind the USA and Thailand. Criminal selectivity works in an explicit way, given that the majority of incarcerated women in Brazil are young, Black, poor and semi-literate. The crime of drug trafficking accounts for more than 62% of female imprisonments, which is a much higher percentage than that of men for the same crime (41%). From a feminist perspective, this chapter analyses and reflects on the specific characteristics of female criminality related to drug trafficking, highlighting how the intersection between gender, race, class and age informs the criminalisation process of women in Brazil.

During the 1920s, military interests in Latin America and international and diplomatic relations gave the impetus to the creation national airlines. In countries like Colombia and Brazil, the technological and commercial approaches of Germany and other Europeans nations influenced the forms airlines took. In the following decade the United States began to exert its influence which was consolidated after the Second World War. The pattern continued until the 1980s and involved strong international regulation, the predominance of publicly owned national airlines, and American technological leadership. Market liberalization then brought about a new scenario involving privatizations of national airlines across the region, intensified competition, and mergers and acquisitions that led to the formation of large carriers. Today, passenger traffic in the region is dominated by two carriers: LATAM and Avianca. Other local airlines remain, often linked to a global alliance member. Air traffic has been grown, with the prospect of further growth after economic recovery flowing the COVID-19 pandemic. Historically, commercial air traffic has adapted to the needs of its vast territory but where institutional changes have played a very important and often decisive role.

Some women who left situations of exploitation falling under the umbrella term of modern slavery in the United Kingdom (UK) are mothers whom I calls survivor mothers in this chapter. Some are determined agents driven to provide better lives for their children. In their journeys after exploitation, they may draw resilience from various resources such as children and survivor communities. The findings in this chapter are based on data collected as part of a broader research project focussing on women’s journeys after exiting exploitation in the UK. Through decolonial feminist methods using a narrative analysis of semi-structured interviews with survivor mothers, I have examined children and survivor communities as resources of resilience in tandem with the structural violence that harms survivor mothers’ capabilities of remodelling life after exploitation. At the same time, I recognise that vulnerability caused by structural violence can drive resistance. By way of resistance, some survivor mothers assert agency. Additionally, I criticise the reductive use of resilience as it often ignores complex structural factors. I conclude that it is impossible to employ resilience uncritically in life after exploitation.

COVID-19 has influenced the way we utilise the radio spectrum in terms of increasing data rates, the localisation of usage, and the transfer of traffic from urban to rural areas. Most regulators have shown sympathy towards operator requirements, stipulating a range of mitigation actions including allowing technology neutrality and temporary assignments. Internationally, the ITU-R suspended all physical meetings and launched a new global network resiliency platform named ‘REG4COVID’ to share experiences including those related to spectrum management.

It is argued in this chapter that the pandemic has supported the calls for additional unlicensed spectrum for Wi-Fi in the 6 GHz and accelerated the rollout of 5G. Moreover, despite of increasing use of streaming, it is quite difficult to assume that traditional linear TV will be replaced, at least in the near future for a variety of reasons. The pandemic has also raised the question as to whether an innovative assignment model could be used to assign the spectrum instead of auctions, and whether, in some countries where temporary assignments were made, frequencies are kept unutilised or reserved. Concerning international spectrum management, it is expected that WRC-23 will be held on time though there will be some implications for issues such as the regulatory time-limits for bringing into use satellite networks frequency assignments. Finally, it is argued that the pandemic has also demonstrated the importance of flexibility and agility in national spectrum management, and placed spectrum managers in a new position where they were forced to be proactive instead of their traditional reactive role.