A/HRC/38/45 victim status granted by another State. 63 Other referral and cooperation issues in transnational referrals 64 include: unassisted return, which can be stressful for trafficked persons, particularly if they fear retribution by their exploiter(s); inadequate referral of cases, which can result in people who are identified as trafficking victims in the destination country remaining unidentified for assistance upon their return home; broken links with established assistance services if authorities from one country return victims to their countries of origin; and a lack of cooperative case planning and management while victims of trafficking are abroad, meaning that they do not always receive a continuity of care upon their return home. 64. In Central America, regional coordination mechanisms — through the regional mechanism against trafficking and smuggling, the Regional Conference on Migration, the Caribbean Council and the Central American Council of Public Ministries — have developed regional and national protocols on this issue to follow up on human trafficking and migration issues in the region. The UNODC Regional Office for Central America and the Caribbean in Panama cooperates with these mechanisms through the preparation of guidelines on information-sharing on trafficking in border areas, addressed to Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras and Panama. It also performs bilateral and regional capacity-building activities and information exchanges on migratory movements among those countries, on regular and irregular migratory paths, with the objective of better identifying vulnerabilities and planning a coordinated response. VI. Conclusions and recommendations A. Conclusions 65. Current approaches to migration and the identification of victims and potential victims of trafficking are taking place in a context in which poisonous political discourse is leading many countries to adopt anti-migration and even racist positions. In these situations, the main concern of many Governments, including many European Governments, is to drastically limit or even block migration movements, with little attention paid to the human rights implications of such policies, and offering no significant solutions, so far, in terms of shared responsibility with countries of first arrival. 66. Today, some protection channels are partially in place, namely, for asylum and international protection, child protection, assistance measures for trafficked persons, and in very limited terms for smuggled persons. Yet, current international protection systems, screening procedures and national cooperation mechanisms have difficulties in adapting to the complex realities of today’s large mixed movements of people arriving through a single entry point at the same time. 67. More specifically, procedures of accurate and early screening based on individual interviews and assessment carried out in a friendly setting, preferably by trained social workers, as well as mechanisms for referral to appropriate institutions, are not systematically established in the places of first arrival of the large influx of refugees and migrants. While there has been promising work in refining indicators of vulnerabilities to trafficking to facilitate detection and referral at an early stage upon arrival, such as the surveys developed by IOM in the Central and Eastern Mediterranean route, 65 there are also concerns over the use of specific profiling techniques in assistance and protection mechanisms and standardized sets of indicators, which might not be comprehensive and might lose sight of other types of vulnerabilities not specifically listed. Excessive profiling can further stigmatize target 63 64 65 16 Ibid., p. 44. Ibid., p. 63. IOM, “Flow monitoring surveys: The human trafficking and other exploitative practices indication survey” (2017), available at http://migration.iom.int/docs/Analysis_Flow_Monitoring_and_Human_ Trafficking_Surveys_in_the_Mediterranean_and_Beyond_26_April_2017.pdf.