A/HRC/23/48 and discrimination. Nevertheless, the Special Rapporteur and her predecessor have noted in the course of country visits that Government authorities make repeated exceptions, in law or in practice, creating spaces where employers can violate labour rights with impunity. 64. To guarantee labour rights, States are required to develop and resource a suitable body of professional labour-law enforcement officials, generally known as labour inspectors. States which fail to develop a labour inspectorate with appropriate expertise and adequate resources to carry out its mandate are in effect condoning abuses of labour rights. Nevertheless, even a well-resourced labour inspectorate is likely to face challenges in reaching the numerous places where exploitation of persons occurs. 65. Evidence collected over the past decade indicates that a substantial proportion of the workers who are trafficked and subjected to forced labour are contract workers who are not recruited or employed directly by the business for which they are working (on a work site, such as a farm or construction site). Instead, they are supplied by an agency or intermediary. In such circumstances, States should consider regulating the activities of recruitment agents and agencies. If they decide not to introduce a system of regulation, States still have a responsibility to ensure that recruitment agents and agencies are not contributing to human trafficking, both by checking on the effectiveness of any system of self-regulation practiced by the employment industry and ensuring that suitably trained law enforcement officials are available to investigate whenever abuses are reported. 3. Human rights impacts of business activities 66. According to the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, “the responsibility to respect human rights requires that business enterprises: (a) avoid causing or contributing to adverse human rights impacts through their own activities, and address such impacts when they occur; (b) seek to prevent or mitigate adverse human rights impacts that are directly linked to their operations, products or services by their business relationships, even if they have not contributed to those impacts” (guiding principle 13). 67. Even businesses which invest significant amounts in checking their supply chains suffer from the fact that there is no internationally recognized standard for the process of checking whether minimum labour standards and human rights standards are respected in the workplace. It is challenging for other businesses and individual consumers to assess whether the cheap cost of a product was due to good business management or due to abuse in the production process. It is the responsibility of the State (in addition to being the responsibility of employers, business owners and investors) to ensure that keeping production costs and wage bills to a minimum is not achieved by illegal or abusive means. 4. Children’s rights 68. The principal responsibility of States in such cases is to protect the children concerned. When there is evidence that the majority of children to be found begging have been trafficked or are being subjected to either forced labour or a practice similar to slavery, the relevant Government authority with appropriate child protection expertise should consider what response is appropriate, notably whether it should involve discouraging children of a certain age from begging, making it a criminal offence to profit from a child‟s begging or discouraging the public from donating money to child beggars in some or all circumstances. When trafficked children are reported to be moved from one State to a neighbouring State, it would be in the best interests of the children concerned for the various States involved to harmonize their responses, so that traffickers cannot simply move on, accompanied by the children they exploit, to take advantage of different laws and regulations in a neighbouring State. 16