The Trafficking in Persons Report, or TIP Report, is an annual report issued by the U.S. State Department's Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons. It ranks governments based on their perceived efforts to acknowledge and combat human trafficking.
The report divides nations into tiers based on their compliance with standards outlined in the TVPA. These tiers are:
Tier 1 Countries whose governments fully comply with the TVPA's minimum standards.
Tier 2 Countries whose governments do not fully comply with the TVPA’s minimum standards, but are making significant efforts to bring themselves into compliance with those standards.
Tier 2 Watchlist Countries whose governments do not fully comply with the TVPA’s minimum standards, but are making significant efforts to bring themselves into compliance with those standards AND: a) The absolute number of victims of severe forms of trafficking is very significant or is significantly increasing; or b) There is a failure to provide evidence of increasing efforts to combat severe forms of trafficking in persons from the previous year; or c) The determination that a country is making significant efforts to bring themselves into compliance with minimum standards was based on commitments by the country to take additional future steps over the next year.
Tier 3 Countries whose governments do not fully comply with the minimum standards and are not making significant efforts to do so.
^a Tier designations:
TIER 1: Countries whose governments fully comply with the Trafficking Victims Protection Act’s (TVPA) minimum standards.
TIER 2: Countries whose governments do not fully comply with the TVPA’s minimum standards, but are making significant efforts to bring themselves into compliance with those standards.
TIER 2 WATCH LIST: Countries whose governments do not fully comply with the TVPA’s minimum standards, but are making significant efforts to bring themselves into compliance with those standards AND:
a) The absolute number of victims of severe forms of trafficking is very significant or is significantly increasing;
b) There is a failure to provide evidence of increasing efforts to combat severe forms of trafficking in persons from the previous year; or
c) The determination that a country is making significant efforts to bring itself into compliance with minimum standards was based on commitments by the country to take additional future steps over the next year.
TIER 3: Countries whose governments do not fully comply with the minimum standards and are not making significant efforts to do so.
Some critics of the Trafficking in Persons Report focus on how its methodology could be improved. For example, one recent academic paper suggests how the rankings could better incorporate risk factors of trafficking in order to focus more on prevention. Another critic argues that the Report should better incorporate "international rules that states (including the USA) have collectively developed and freely accepted," rather than focusing on criteria drawn up solely by U.S. politicians.
Other critics more fundamentally question its methodology and sources, such as anthropologist Laura Agustín, who writes that the Report "relies on CIA, police and embassy guesstimates of situations that are not understood the same way across all cultures and social classes."
