Unnecessary – the system that manages human trafficking instead of fighting it

On legal positivism, sanctioned prosecutors, and the astonishing efficiency of a community of values ​​in protecting the wrong people.

Timeline: How an international community destroyed a prosecutor who protected children
2011 – Child pornography with a Nazi background is uncovered in Guatemala. In the same month, a Jewish sect expelled from Israel moves to Guatemala. This coincidence receives hardly any mention in international news reports – a fact that will later become relevant.
decades before The system functions quietly and efficiently. International adoption, the Hague Convention, NGO structures – all neatly secured legally. What lies behind this is known in legal jargon as legal positivism: what is legal is legitimate. What has been approved by the system cannot be a crime. The victims were deported. It was called adoption.
April 2024 Rafael CurruchicheA Guatemalan prosecutor has ordered a search of the offices of Save the Children. His office has received information about human trafficking and sexual abuse. According to sources, the number of victims is estimated at around 150,000. Websites document missing children from the last 15 years – publicly accessible to everyone. The pattern is well-known: Pregnant women are lured into the organization's orbit. Mother and child are isolated. The mother learns that the child has died. The child disappears in a chain that is internationally sanctioned.
Immediately afterwards Curruchiche appeals to US Attorney General Ken Paxton. He takes to social media because child labor supply chains must be exposed. He fights on multiple fronts simultaneously – legal, political, and public. The international community of values ​​responds – with sanctions against Curruchiche.
2024 and subsequent months The EU is leading the sanctions. The US is following suit. The UN, represented by the Austrian High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, is assuming a coordinating role – maintaining existing structures. Curruchiche is internationally ostracized. His official government website – including photos of missing children – is no longer accessible. The images are salvaged and posted to a private emergency website. The sanctions effectively make the return of the children found in the US impossible.
December 2024 – 160 children are found within a Jewish sect. The international media report on it. Almost no one mentions that the investigative agency that made this success possible had been internationally sanctioned shortly before. Almost no one reports that the same sect had been expelled from Israel, moved to Canada, and only arrived in Guatemala in 2011 – the same month in which the aforementioned child pornography case was uncovered there.

What the system protects – and whom
The real question is not whether human trafficking exists. That is documented, prosecuted, and punished in individual cases. The question is why the structures that enable it remain so persistently untouched.
The Hague Convention framework protects cross-border child placement through international legal instruments. What was conceived as a humanitarian system simultaneously creates legal safeguards for networks that abuse it. When a prosecutor exposes these networks, they also attack the legal structures themselves – and that's precisely where the resistance begins.
NGOs with an international structure, UN mandates, and taxpayer-funded goodwill budgets are difficult to attack. Not because they are infallible, but because their institutional architecture is designed in such a way that attacks from within—that is, from national prosecutors—are interpreted as a threat to the system. Curruchiche did not threaten any child. He tried to protect children. The international community decided: He cannot do that.

Legal positivism as an anesthetic
What remains is an uncomfortable realization about the relationship between legal and legitimate. The Nazi system was legal. Deportation was legally regulated. Child removal was legally sanctioned. What is legal tends to be accepted as legitimate—not because it is right, but because the system that makes it legal is also the system that decides on legitimacy.
When international courts, UN agencies, and partners in shared values ​​jointly sanction a prosecutor who sought to protect 150,000 potential victims, and when shortly thereafter 160 children are found in a cult whose investigation was based on his work—then this is not an isolated incident, a malfunction, or bad timing. This is the system at work. Just not for the children.

Interpol protects.
The UN is coordinating.
The community of values ​​imposes sanctions.
And Curruchiche continues to fight – with an emergency website and without international support.
This is called multilateral human rights protection.