Restorative Criminal Policy in Human Trafficking Crime: The Refusal or Possibility (with a look to the American and French law)

The characteristics of this serious organized crime, which mainly threatens the internal and external security of countries, have led to the formation of a repressive criminal policy in most countries. Indeed, the necessity to deal effectively with human trafficking has led countries to adopt a policy approach based on repressive measures. It can be said that the dangerousness and incorrigibility of human trafficking offenders have become two complementary and irrefutable criminal narratives, the main reason for which is the emergence of two theories, “refusal to rehabilitate offenders” and “refusal for restorative policy against human trafficking”. Despite this view, in this research, an attempt is made to reverse these two super narratives of the enemy-oriented criminal policy and to argue in the direction of establishing a restorative discourse with the aim of gradually restoring the anti-human trafficking criminal policy. The present research is written based on descriptive and analytical methods, and the methods of collecting information are from library-documentary studies. The researcher's effort in this article is to criticize the theory of “refusal for restorative justice” and defend the theory of “the possibility of restoring the criminal policy against human trafficking”. Considering this issue, this article aims to analyze the feasibility and efficiency of implementing restorative justice regarding human trafficking and concludes with a descriptive-analytical approach that relying only on the criminal response is not sufficient or efficient to deal with such crimes. In this regard, the author argues that the assumption is based on the possibility of using (and the efficiency of) restorative programs for human trafficking offenders and that a restorative response can be implemented in parallel with punitive measures regarding these crimes.