MPSC 2021 Prelims Paper-I · Question 94 of 100

Correct — option (2), Human trafficking. The Blue Heart Campaign is an international anti-trafficking initiative of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. It was launched in March 2009 by the Office's Executive Director, Antonio Maria Costa, during his address to a women's conference meeting in Vienna, where UNODC has its headquarters, and its symbol is a blue heart. The campaign's purpose is public awareness: it asks people, institutions and governments to display the blue heart as a sign of solidarity with the victims of trafficking in persons and of refusal to accept the trade in human beings, and it has been adopted as a national campaign by a number of governments. The reason this question is harder than it looks is contained in the name of the sponsoring body, and the stem draws attention to it by calling UNODC 'an UN institution' without naming it. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime is the drugs agency of the United Nations as well as its crime agency, so a candidate who identifies the body correctly and then reasons from its name will move towards narcotics and choose the wrong option. Trafficking in persons falls to UNODC because it is the guardian of the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime and of the protocol supplementing it that deals with trafficking in persons, especially women and children — the instrument agreed at Palermo in 2000 which gave the world its first agreed definition of trafficking, covering the recruitment, transport, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons by threat, force, coercion, abduction, fraud or deception for the purpose of exploitation. Once the treaty link is understood, the campaign's home in UNODC stops being surprising. The blank in the stem is therefore filled by human trafficking, and the answer is option (2). Note that the English column prints 'an UN institution' and sets 'Blue heart campaign' with a lower-case h; both are reproduced as printed, and the Marathi stem is framed as a direct question where the English one is a fill-in-the-blank.

• (1)AIDS — The awareness symbol associated with HIV and AIDS is the red ribbon, not a blue heart, and the United Nations body concerned is UNAIDS, the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, which coordinates the work of several agencies rather than sitting inside the drugs and crime office. World AIDS Day is observed on 1 December. The option is offered because coloured symbols and ribbons are used by so many health and rights campaigns that a candidate who has not learnt the specific pairing may connect any of them with any cause. The way to make these questions safe is to learn the symbol, the cause, the sponsoring body and the observance day as a single unit, since the Commission may ask for any one of the four and give the others.
• (3)Drugs — This is the trap the question is designed around, and it catches the better-informed candidate rather than the weaker one. The campaign is run by the United Nations Office on DRUGS and Crime, so a candidate who correctly identifies the sponsoring body and then infers the subject from its name will land here. But UNODC's mandate is wide: it covers narcotics, corruption, organised crime, terrorism prevention and criminal justice, and trafficking in persons falls to it as custodian of the Palermo protocol on that subject. The drugs side of its work has its own observance, the International Day against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking on 26 June, and it is worth keeping that separate from the World Day against Trafficking in Persons on 30 July. Inferring a campaign's subject from its sponsor's name is exactly the reasoning this item punishes.
• (4)Flood relief — No United Nations campaign of this name concerns floods, and disaster relief is not within the remit of the drugs and crime office at all. Humanitarian response in the United Nations system is coordinated by the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, while disaster risk reduction is the work of the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, which administers the Sendai Framework. The option is present as an unrelated fourth choice, of the kind an examiner includes to complete a set rather than to tempt anybody in particular. Its only instructional value is a reminder that the United Nations is a system of specialised bodies with distinct mandates, and that identifying which body runs a programme usually narrows the possible subject to two or three.

Trafficking in persons is defined internationally by the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children, agreed at Palermo in 2000 to supplement the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime. The definition has three parts that must all be present for an adult victim — an act, such as recruitment or transport; a means, such as force, coercion, fraud or the abuse of a position of vulnerability; and a purpose of exploitation, which includes sexual exploitation, forced labour, slavery and the removal of organs. For a child, the means element is not required, so consent is irrelevant. UNODC is the custodian of the protocol, publishes the Global Report on Trafficking in Persons and runs the Blue Heart Campaign, launched in March 2009, whose blue heart is displayed as a mark of solidarity with victims; the General Assembly has also designated 30 July as the World Day against Trafficking in Persons. In India the subject sits at the meeting point of constitutional and criminal law: Article 23 prohibits traffic in human beings and forced labour and makes their practice an offence, Article 24 forbids the employment of children below fourteen in factories, mines and other hazardous work, the Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act, 1956 deals with commercial sexual exploitation, and the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, 2013 inserted a comprehensive definition of trafficking into the Indian Penal Code. Anti-Human Trafficking Units function under the State police forces, with the Ministry of Home Affairs as the nodal ministry at the Centre.

Campaigns, days, symbols and reports of international organisations form a distinct sub-section of MPSC's current-affairs block, and they are asked because a single line of preparation covers them. What this particular question tests, beyond recall, is whether a candidate can resist a plausible inference. The stem deliberately withholds the name of the agency and describes it only as a United Nations institution, so a candidate who supplies the name from memory gets a strong nudge towards narcotics; the item is therefore as much about reading discipline as about knowledge. The wider lesson is to learn a programme with its subject attached rather than with its sponsor attached, because sponsors have broad mandates and subjects do not. It is also worth preparing the Indian side of any international theme the Commission raises. Trafficking is a subject on which India has constitutional provisions, a dedicated statute, an Indian Penal Code definition and an administrative structure, and MPSC is at least as likely to ask about Article 23 or about Anti-Human Trafficking Units as about a UNODC campaign. Reading the international and Indian material together costs little more than reading either alone.

• The Blue Heart Campaign is an international anti-trafficking initiative of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, launched in March 2009 by its Executive Director Antonio Maria Costa during an address to a women's conference in Vienna; its symbol is a blue heart.
• UNODC's mandate covers narcotics, organised crime, corruption, terrorism prevention and criminal justice, and it is the custodian of the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime and of the Palermo protocol of 2000 on trafficking in persons.
• The Palermo definition requires an act, a means and a purpose of exploitation for an adult victim; where the victim is a child the element of means is not required and consent is irrelevant.
• The General Assembly has designated 30 July as the World Day against Trafficking in Persons; UNODC's separate drugs mandate has its own observance, the International Day against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking on 26 June.
• In India, Article 23 of the Constitution prohibits traffic in human beings and forced labour, the Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act, 1956 addresses commercial sexual exploitation, the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, 2013 inserted a definition of trafficking into the Indian Penal Code, and Anti-Human Trafficking Units work under the State police with the Ministry of Home Affairs as the nodal ministry.

• Inferring a campaign's subject from the name of the agency that runs it. UNODC is the drugs office and the crime office, and the Blue Heart Campaign belongs to its work on trafficking in persons
• Attaching the wrong symbol to the wrong cause. The red ribbon belongs to HIV and AIDS, whose United Nations body is UNAIDS and whose day is 1 December
• Confusing the two UNODC observances — 26 June for drug abuse and illicit trafficking, and 30 July for trafficking in persons
• Preparing only the international layer of a theme. MPSC is as likely to ask about Article 23 of the Constitution or about Anti-Human Trafficking Units as about the campaign itself

International campaigns and days are asked in a small number of interchangeable forms — name the campaign and ask for the subject, name the subject and ask for the agency, name the agency and ask for the report it publishes, or give a date and ask what is observed on it. All of them are answered from one table with four columns: campaign or day, subject, sponsoring body, and any Indian counterpart. The Indian column is what distinguishes MPSC preparation from generic current affairs, because the Commission likes to follow an international item with a domestic one on the same theme, and because a State services candidate is expected to know the machinery he may one day work in. Expect also that the harder version of a question of this kind will describe the sponsoring body rather than name it, as this stem does, and that the description will be chosen to mislead.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The 'Blue Heart Campaign' is run by which of the following United Nations bodies ?

  • (a)The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime
  • (b)The Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS
  • (c)The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs
  • (d)The United Nations Children's Fund

  Answer(a) The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. UNODC launched the campaign in March 2009 in Vienna to raise awareness of trafficking in persons, and its blue heart is displayed as a mark of solidarity with the victims of the trade. The office runs the campaign because it is the custodian of the Palermo protocol of 2000 on trafficking in persons, and not because trafficking has anything to do with narcotics; its separate drugs mandate is marked by the International Day against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking on 26 June.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which Article of the Constitution of India prohibits traffic in human beings and forced labour ?

  • (a)Article 21
  • (b)Article 23
  • (c)Article 24
  • (d)Article 19

  Answer(b) Article 23. It prohibits traffic in human beings, begar and other similar forms of forced labour, and makes any contravention an offence punishable in accordance with law; it also permits the State to impose compulsory service for public purposes without discrimination on grounds only of religion, race, caste or class. Article 24, which follows it, forbids the employment of children below fourteen years in any factory or mine or other hazardous employment, and the two together form the right against exploitation.