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.