I think that they're working, in part because they have been an extremely disruptive force. Without this brash, young, and active challenge from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and the protocols themselves, I suspect the IOM, the ILO and other international entities would've continued to chug along with the forced forms of exploitation subsumed into other parts of their mission.
Previous mechanisms just didn’t work. Whether we’re talking about the 1956 Anti-Slavery Convention, the 1957 Forced Labour Convention, or even the 1999 Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention, none of these were focused on victims in the communities in the way that the three-P paradigm – prevention, prosecution, protection – of the Palermo Protocols is.
Likewise, look at how older British or US paradigms dealt with the sex industry. These laws basically exempted sex workers from ever being classified as being enslaved, even if they had suffered coercion. Instead, they subjected them to a legal regime based on international commerce and movement that considered sex workers unwanted commodities, as opposed to people whose rights may have been violated. That might be the most important part of the Palermo Protocol: it says that it doesn't matter if a person in prostitution chose to do that work, were forced into it, or had crossed a border or migrated. Rather, it focuses on whether they were held in compelled service at any time, regardless of initial consent or foreknowledge, and no matter whether they are in their hometown or thousands of miles away. Conceptually, these changes ended up expanding protection to a lot of people who had been exempted from earlier human rights concepts.
