The Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC) presented the Global Organized Crime Index on its website, according to which Serbia ranks 40th out of 193 countries in the world.
According to the index, levels of organized crime are rising globally, with 83 percent of the world’s population living in countries with high levels of crime.
The GI-TOC report states that Serbia continues to be a source, transit, and destination country for victims of human trafficking.
“Serbian women and children are subjected to sexual trafficking, including child marriages, in neighboring countries, while men are usually trafficked for forced labor, mainly in the construction industry,” the report states.
The report added that foreign male workers, primarily from Vietnam and India, are reportedly facing forced labor in Serbia.
“Online sexual exploitation, especially of children, is a common cyber-enabled human trafficking crime in Serbia and has increased in frequency during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, as traffickers adapted their operations and shifted to online recruitment methods, such as social media platforms,” the report states.
The report mentions that human smuggling has been a longstanding issue in Serbia due to the country’s location on the Balkan migrant route.
“A recent increase in the number of irregular migrants in Serbia has led to a subsequent rise in human smuggling and the number of criminal groups involved in these activities. Consequently, armed conflicts between human smuggling groups have escalated. Tighter border controls with Croatia and Hungary have led to the emergence of new informal routes passing through Serbia and Montenegro into Bosnia and Herzegovina (west) or from Serbia into Bulgaria and Romania (east). Victims of human smuggling in Serbia mainly come from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Syria. Crime bosses usually manage operations from outside the country, and while most smugglers share the same nationality as their victims, local criminals often handle domestic transportation and irregular border crossings,” it said.
Extortion is widespread but underestimated in Serbia, the report’s authors said.
“It is common for individuals to extort relatively small amounts of money from people in financially difficult situations through loan-taking. In many cases, so-called hooligan criminal groups operating private security companies will extort restaurants or clubs for protection money. Victims generally do not report such crimes to authorities out of fear of repercussions, and the phenomenon remains largely under-reported,” the report on Serbia from the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime states.
