Correspondence: Camelia M. Tepelus, IIIEE, c/o ECPAT, 157 Montague Street, Brooklyn NY 11021, USA. Tel: +1 718 935 9192; Fax +718 935 9173; E-mail: camelia.tepelus@iiiee.lu.se

¹is a research associate and PhD candidate at IIIEE at Lund University, Sweden. Ms Tepelus holds an MSc in Environmental Management and Policy from Lund University, a marketing BS from the Academy of Economical Sciences of Bucharest and an engineering BS from Politehnica University of Bucharest. Her doctoral research concerns sustainable development in tourism, corporate social responsibility and the tourism impacts on human rights.

Received 13 September 2007; Revised 13 September 2007; Published online 10 March 2008.

Abstract

Ethical questions related to globalisation, human rights, unfair labour practices and trans-boundary exchanges of capital and workforce create ever more complex challenges for the tourism sustainability agenda. In recent years, the tourism industry has been increasingly challenged by media and governments to provide fast, socially responsible responses to emerging problems resulting from the dissolution of borders and workforce migration. Two particularly challenging phenomena that regularly make headlines are trafficking in human beings and child sex tourism. The main objective of this paper is to present existing good practices for preventing and combating trafficking of human beings and its links with the travel industry, and child sex tourism. Secondly, the paper calls for the morphing of empirical models into sustained innovation and public policies, and reviews several factors that may be necessary for this transformation to begin. The discussion is framed within the context of corporate social responsibility for sustainable tourism.