This section of the paper seeks to determine whether all States Parties to the
Protocol have a transnational duty to prevent human trafficking in countries of
origin. The provision that is the subject of our interpretive inquiry is 9(4), which
reads:
States Parties shall take or strengthen measures, including through bilateral or
multilateral cooperation, to alleviate the factors that make persons, especially
women and children, vulnerable to trafficking, such as poverty,
underdevelopment and lack of equal opportunity.
The particular interpretive query is: did States Parties intentionally sign
themselves up for mandatory transnational obligations to address the root causes of
human trafficking in countries of origin? In order to answer this interpretative
question this paper uses the approach set forth in the Vienna Convention on the
Law of Treaties Articles 31 and 32 as a starting point.
A. Ordinary Meaning
When interpreting the words of a treaty, the starting point is the ordinary
meaning of the terms of the treaty.52 The language in a treaty should be given its
normal and natural meaning, the interpretation that is standard and
commonplace. The "ordinary meaning" rule of statutory interpretation is rooted
in the assumption that the drafters intended words to have their common, usual
and normal meaning unless a contrary meaning is given. The ultimate goal of
treaty interpretation is to discover which obligations, rights and responsibilities
the parties to the treaty intended to sign themselves up for. Ascribing the natural
meaning to language to discover the likely intended meaning of that language is
therefore a reasonable and useful exercise regardless of whether or not it is
prescribed by the Vienna Convention.
The object of our inquiry is not a specific word or even a particular phrase,
but rather a whole sentence. Specifically, we are seeking to clarify whether and to
what extent States Parties intended to sign themselves up for mandatory
transnational obligations to establish prevention programs in countries of origin.
In examining the ordinary meaning of 9(4) it is useful to separate the provision
into its distinct parts, and examine the natural or normal meaning of each part