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The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) has called urgent attention to the rights violations endured by irregular migrants in its recently released report, Perilous Passage: Human Smuggling in Pakistan, produced under the prestigious Fakhruddin G. Ebrahim Fellowship. The report seeks to reconceive human smuggling as a serious human rights violation issue and not merely as a transnational crime, given that victims of human smuggling are vulnerable to torture, extortion, abuse, blackmail, imprisonment, and even death. It argues that irregular migration through human smuggling networks is almost always an act of economic desperation. However, the widespread belief that migrants choose to cross borders illegally—and therefore consent to the dangers of the journey and accompanying explo...