In late July the United States State Department released its annualTrafficking in Persons (TIP) report, an influential diplomatic tool that threatens sanctions against countries that fail to crack down on the human trafficking trade. Thailand — a notorious trafficking hub — kept its spot in “Tier 3,” the lowest possible rank. Human rights activists welcomed the decision as “a powerful incentive” for Thailand to take further steps to combat trafficking. But this may not be entirely true.

In many ways the TIP report is a microcosm for the myriad problems in the U.S.-led anti-trafficking agenda, which despite bold rhetoric and millions of dollars in funding has failed or even hurt migrants and refugees. It has fed a chaotic global obsession with policing and prosecutions, but resulted in few concrete policies to address the underlying causes of trafficking or to assist its victims. This has been acutely felt in Thailand, a politically volatile country seesawing between military coups and failed democratic governments. In recent months the ruling junta has led an aggressive anti-trafficking campaign to satisfy its Western critics. But instead of reducing trafficking and forced labor, these efforts appear to have marginalized human rights and trampled on the most vulnerable.

The human cost of Thailand’s anti-trafficking efforts was thrust into the limelight in May, when the government escalated a crackdown on smuggling camps in its southern provinces. This followed the discovery of dozens of unmarked graves belonging to Bangladeshi migrants and Rohingya Muslims, a minority fleeing persecution in Burma, and triggered one of Southeast Asia’s worst humanitarian catastrophes in recent years when smugglers cast thousands of famished boat people adrift in the Andaman Sea. But while dozens of traffickers, including a senior army officer, have since been arrested, Thailand steadfastly refused to offer sanctuary to any of their victims. In a remarkable display of unconcern, Thai Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha urged anyone who felt sorry for the arrivals to “migrate” to sea and swap places with them.

The emergency unleashed a flurry of media interest and elicited outrage across the world. Many decried Thailand’s refusal to accept the desperate migrants and refugees, while others focused their criticisms on Burma’s treatment of the Rohingya, who, denied citizenship in their homeland, are regularly attacked by Buddhist nationalists. But the recent crisis also raises questions about the efficacy of global anti-trafficking policy, spearheaded by the United States. In fact, Thailand has openly declared that its ongoing crackdown on trafficking is largely a response to being downgraded in the U.S. report last year.

“There is clear evidence that the Department’s annual Trafficking in Persons Report has played a critical role over its 15-year history in elevating trafficking in persons on the agenda of the international community and in countries around the world,” said Mai Shiozaki, Public Affairs Officer at the U.S. Trafficking in Persons Office. “We consistently hear from civil society groups, international organizations, and governments that our report is the ‘gold standard’ in anti-trafficking assessments.”

But while the TIP report is often trumpeted as the global paradigm in anti-trafficking advocacy, it has produced poor results. According to a 2011 study, overall country rankings have not improved since the report’s launch in 2000, reflecting a failure to reduce human trafficking in Southeast Asia.

Some activists have blamed this on the growing politicization of the report, which rarely designates U.S. allies lower than “Tier 2” status. Malaysia earned a controversial upgrade this year despite an counter-trafficking record no better than Thailand’s — a move that has been linked to the Obama administration’s desire to clench a lucrative trade deal. Burma kept its place on the Tier-2 watch list for the fourth year running despite fueling Southeast Asia’s worst boat people exodus since the Vietnam War. A recent Reuters investigation revealed that the State Department watered down over a dozen rankings due to pressure from American diplomats, effectively reducing the report to a fickle foreign policy device.

However, this analysis — accompanied by calls for stricter enforcement of the report — glosses over more profound deficiencies in U.S. anti-trafficking policy. One notable example is the State Department’s disproportionate focus on sex trafficking and prohibitionist approach towards sex work. The U.S. government continues to deny anti-trafficking funding to any countries that have decriminalized prostitution, and fails to clearly distinguish between voluntary sex workers and victims of trafficking. This policy has encouraged politically unstable countries to violate the rights of sex workers and pursue clumsy counter-trafficking measures designed to inflate statistics. In 2013, Thailand prosecuted 374 people for involvement in sex trafficking but only 53 involved in other forms of labor exploitation. This is despite mounting evidence that bonded labor, especially in the fishing and seafood industries, accounts for the vast majority of trafficking cases in Thailand. It is not uncommon for the police to raid brothels in the weeks before their TIP reporting deadlines, often falsely identifying undocumented migrants as trafficking victims in order to boost their figures.

But perhaps the biggest problem in the global anti-trafficking agenda is its preoccupation with border policing and law enforcement. According to a 2014 report by the Global Alliance Against Trafficking in Women (GAATW), international efforts to combat trafficking are failing or even harming victims despite pumping more than $120 million dollars a year into dismantling criminal networks and boosting prosecutions. There is very little scrutiny over how anti-trafficking funding is spent and who actually benefits. Some have attributed this to a naive perception that anti-trafficking work is intrinsically “good” — a bias that is reflected in the TIP report’s failure to assess trends in research and funding.

“In recent years governments have rushed to spend money on a range of poorly designed initiatives in the hope of avoiding or moving out of a low ranking in the U.S. government’s yearly Trafficking in Persons Report,” warns the GAATW publication.

Shiozaki insists that the blame lies with the implementing countries and not the United States, yet the State Department has steadfastly ignored calls to conduct human rights impact assessments of its anti-trafficking work. In 2013 Thailand spent $6.1 million on anti-trafficking activities, yet only $143,000 — or just over two percent — was allocated to victims. Over the past few months, the Thai government has pursued increasingly punitive criminal measures, including imposing the death penalty for human trafficking offenses, in order to appease the United States. These efforts have been energized by the Thai junta’s desire to regain international legitimacy after last year’s coup. However, Thailand routinely deports trafficking survivors — including Rohingya asylum seekers from Burma — and has resisted calls to sign the U.N. Refugee Convention.

The U.N. Trafficking in Persons Protocol, signed by Thailand in 2013, is equally problematic, again mostly characterizing trafficking as a question of transnational crime. The framework fails to adequately address the root causes of such abuses, including a lack of free movement and a global economic system that relies on the exploitation of migrant and labor rights. Instead the U.N. protocol has often been used an excuse to impose draconian border controls, which only serves to drive undocumented migrants and asylum seekers into the arms of traffickers. This is particularly troubling in countries that lack adequate protection and labor rights mechanisms, such as Thailand.

“States are afforded great leeway and discretion in the way they implement their protection obligations, with the predictable result that trafficked persons have so far seen little concrete benefit,” writes Jacqueline Bhaba, guest editor of the Global Anti-Trafficking Review released in April. 

In this context, it is hardly surprising that Rohingya refugees and Bangladeshi migrants were discarded at sea while Southeast Asian nations squabbled over how to combat “illegal smuggling.” Other affected countries similarly invoked criminal rather than humanitarian terminology to frame the boat crisis. Burma — where Rohingya are treated as illegal migrants from Bangladesh and heavily persecuted — has stepped up navy patrols in the Bay of Bengal “to deter any illegal trespassing” but refused to acknowledge its role in the exodus. This language reflects Burma’s official position that Rohingya are interlopers from Bangladesh, and part of the reason that this myth is so effective is that it feeds into a global narrative that demonizes economic migrants.

Other Asian governments hostile to “trespassers” did not have to look far for international support. Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbot became the first Western leader to defend Southeast Asia’s initial pushbacks of boat people, describing it as “absolutely necessary if the scourge of people smuggling is to be beaten.” The Director of the Burmese President’s Office, Zaw Htay, pursued a similar line by drawing a snide comparison between the Southeast Asian crisis and the European Union’s plans to destroy migrant shipping vessels in the Mediterranean.

Indeed, the issue of slavery and human trafficking cannot be viewed outside the prism of migrant and labor rights. Unfortunately, however, the global focus has come to prioritize the criminal aspect of the trade, allowing governments to deflect attention from victim protection and human rights. Up to a million undocumented migrants are employed under abusive or slave-like conditions in Thailand. Asia harbors two-thirds of the world’s estimated 36 million trafficking victims — a number that has failed to drop despite the widespread adoption of the U.N. anti-trafficking protocol and 15 years on from the first TIP report. In other words, the system is failing — and it is high time we changed tack.

In the photo, a Rohingya woman from Bangladesh holds a photograph of her son, who disappeared after being trafficked to Malaysia even though she paid the ransom his traffickers demanded. She has not heard from him since.

Photo credit: Shazia Rahman/Getty Images

Both government and opposition see bashing the besieged Rohingya minority as a sure-fire path to electoral success.

The Burmese government recently came under fire for back-pedaling on a pledge to grant the country’s beleaguered Rohingya minority the right to vote. On Feb. 12, the government announced the imminent suspension of all temporary ID cards held by over half a million Rohingya Muslims in western Burma, dashing hopes that they might be allowed to vote in Burma’s first general election in over 50 years, scheduled for the end of this year.

The proposal to grant the Rohingya voting rights — aggressively promoted by Burma’s ruling Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) and passed by parliament on Feb. 2 — had been seen as a flicker of hope for the stateless Muslim minority squeezed into apartheid-like conditions near the Bangladeshi border. But President Thein Sein quickly bowed to a growing Buddhist protest movement and withdrew his support. A spokesperson for the U.S. government criticized his decision as “counter to reconciliation in Rakhine [state],” where outbursts of religious violence between Rakhine Buddhists and Rohingya Muslims have claimed dozens of lives since 2012. The sad reality is that the proposal was never more than a cynical political ploy to harness votes for the military-aligned USDP ahead of the highly anticipated elections. The government’s rapid U-turn only exposes its two-faced policy toward the Rohingya.

Indeed, the military and its proxy parties have simultaneously suppressed and courted the Rohingya vote since 2008, when the military welcomed their support to help rig a referendum approving a controversial new constitution. In the flawed 2010 election, many stateless Rohingya were offered the prospect of citizenship in exchange for casting their ballots for the USDP, which subsequently grasped power in three Muslim-majority constituencies in northern Rakhine State. Once in office, President Thein Sein’s government quickly reneged on these commitments.

There are currently six ethnic Rohingya legislators representing the USDP in northern Rakhine: three at the state and three at the national level. These politicians, who took up their posts promising to secure greater rights and freedoms for their people, have proven troublesome for the ruling party. Shwe Maung, a Rohingya member of the national parliament, has drawn considerable ire for his unapologetic activism on behalf of his constituency. Last year a presidential spokesman accused him of “defamation” for implicating local police officers in an alleged massacre of Rohingya in the western town of Maungdaw.

Nonetheless, in 2010 the Rohingya vote was essential to the USDP, with nearly half of its legislators in Rakhine elected by the minority (while several more seats were obtained through electoral fraud). The USDP’s overtures to the Rohingya also provoked hostility from the Buddhist-majority ethnic Rakhine — another minority group long persecuted by the military junta — who mostly view the Rohingya as “illegal immigrants” from neighboring Bangladesh, and see the government’s courting of their vote as a betrayal of their state for political profit. Buoyed by hostility toward the Burman-dominated military, a nationalist Rakhine party (now known as the Rakhine National Party or RNP), won a majority of seats in the national and regional parliaments. The RNP and other Rakhine nationalist parties have since spearheaded efforts to marginalize and disenfranchise the Rohingya, whose plight became more acute in 2012, when religious violence forced some 140,000 of them into cramped, disease-infested camps. With its new influence in parliament, the RNP has successfully pushed through a law banning undocumented Rohingya from forming political parties.

As in 2010, the RNP now poses a significant electoral threat to the USDP in Rakhine State, where the ruling party is likely to lose most of its remaining seats in the 2015 poll without the Rohingya vote. This is why the USDP once again turned — briefly — to the Rohingya in an effort to attract voters in the region this year. This is not without a small tinge of irony, considering the government’s oppression of the minority, who Thein Sein has repeatedly threatened to deport from Burma.

Unfortunately, a tide of Buddhist nationalism has now made it more politically profitable to vilify the Rohingya than to woo them for their votes. Since the 2012 violence, the unpopular minority has become a rallying tool for both ethnic Rakhine and Burman political parties — boosted by a nationwide crusade to “defend” Buddhism against Islam. The government has never recognized the term “Rohingya” and has been accused of complicity in a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the minority. President Thein Sein has even publicly defended the country’s most venomous hate preacher,Ashin Wirathu, who has likened Muslims to “mad dogs.”

Wirathu’s powerful Buddhist nationalist group, known locally as the “Ma Ba Tha,” has collaborated with the government to draft a set of “race and religious protection” laws designed to restrict the rights of Muslims. In turn, Wirathu has backed Thein Sein and warned against amending the constitution to allow opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi a chance at the presidency. This cozy relationship exposes the political value of exploiting, rather than soothing, anti-Muslim sentiments in the run-up to the elections. In this context, it should come as no surprise that the USDP leadership quickly abandoned its flirtations with the Rohingya vote.

The military, which has a long history of pitting the country’s myriad ethnic and religious groups against each other, has even less incentive to support the reviled minority. Since 2012, ethnic Rakhine have welcomed thousands of Burmese troops into the restive state to maintain security. The military’s role has been amplified by persistent rumors — often repeated by the government — that Rohingya separatists are now active along the Bangladeshi border. The threat of instability and violence may thus serve as an alternate strategy to boost the army’s popularity in Rakhine and defend its grip over Burmese politics.

Shwe Maung, one of the Rohingya lawmakers from Rakhine, concedes that the USDP leadership “may have another plan” in place for winning support in Rakhine. He says he feels “betrayed” by the government, and will not stand in the 2015 election unless temporary ID or “white card” holders are allowed to vote. This looks increasingly unlikely, as white cards will be invalidated from March 31, rendering their owners unable to vote under Burmese election law. As some 95 percent of Shwe Maung’s constituency are Muslim Rohingya, the disenfranchisement of its population could be devastating — not least if Rakhine nationalists secured his seat.

The Burmese government continues to push ahead with its controversial nationality verification process, which will require Rohingya Muslims to label themselves as “Bengali” in order to obtain citizenship. The few Rohingya who have accepted this designation have seen no significant changes to their standard of living, remaining confined to peripheral slums or displacement camps with limited access to education and healthcare. All Rohingya “white card” holders will now be obligated to undergo this process after their documents expire next month. Those who refuse risk deportation.

The idea of using the Rohingya as pawns rather than allies seems to have permeated the opposition party as well. Democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi’s party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), also fought against the bid to enfranchise the Rohingya, with one of the party’s lawmakers dismissing the proposal as “inconsistent” with other legislation. It is not the first time the Nobel laureate has drawn criticism for her silence on the oppression of the Rohingya or Burma’s escalating anti-Muslim sentiments. In December, the NLD fired one of its leaders for making a public speech criticizing the proliferation of Buddhist extremism. He is now facing a three-year jail sentence for “insulting” religion. Suu Kyi has never spoken in his support.

Her silence has been widely interpreted as a Machiavellian gambit designed to avoid controversy ahead of the 2015 election that, assuming it is free and fair, her party is expected to win by a landslide. The upsurge in religious hostility — which has claimed hundreds of mostly Muslim lives across the country since 2012 — is seen by some as a manufactured attempt to fracture her popular support base. Either way, Suu Kyi – like her uniformed opponents — seems to have prioritized political cunning over human rights.

As Burma’s historic elections draw nearer, it is becoming increasingly clear that the Rohingya have little to gain from the country’s political transition, which ended five decades of military rule in 2011. Neither the ruling party nor the opposition has ever been genuinely interested in promoting their rights. On Wednesday, a UN human rights chief warned Burmese politicians against fanning the “flames of prejudice” to win votes in the upcoming poll. Unfortunately, it would appear that the besieged minority carries far greater political currency as scapegoats than as full-fledged participants in Burma’s fragile democracy.