THE EVENTUAL ENDING of the Cold War certainly provided the opportunity for nations to consider a more cooperative approach to human nghts issues. The near automatic reflexes that had characterized great power behaviour in the 1950s and 1960s and the gradual thawing of ties between the rival superpowers and their alliance structures over the next two decades were now seemingly over. This made at least the possibility of greater attention on individuals per se at the expense of the traditional insistence of states on non-interference in how they conducted their domestic affairs and behaved towards citizens.

Human rights might yet suddenly come of age; what had often been little more than formal acceptance of international declarations and conventions would now be tested to determine if past statements on the universality of human dignity and government accountability were to prove more than just casual promises and mere signatures on embossed paper. Implementation and more effective schemes of external monitoring would have to follow or the rhetonc of agreed international standards would be shown up to be dangerously false.

Sustained American attention to human trafficking began under President Clinton. While some of his predecessors, notably President Carter, had certainly professed a public interest in the promotion of human rights, it was only with Clinton that any particular attention was placed on how best to tackle the vast and little understood issues surrounding trafficking. It was his administration that first established what would prove to be an ongoing annual series of reports that attempted to survey and critique on a country by country basis the global dimensions of the issue. The venture was bold, unprecedented and controversial from the outset.