Thomas Ahlstrand is deputy chief prosecutor at the National Public Prosecution Department in Gothenburg where he works against organized crime with international elements. Trained as a lawyer with a Master of Law degree he has been a public prosecutor for about thirty years, apart from spells as a Court of Appeals judge and solicitor in private practice. For the last fifteen years he has been specializing in cases concerning trafficking in human beings, especially for sexual purposes. His experience in this field has made him a strong advocate for the Swedish legal regulation that criminalizes the purchase of sexual services - but not the prostitute - as an important tool in an efficient combat against procuring, trafficking and exploitation of distressed women. He has lectured on the subject in different international and national conferences, administered by, among others, the Swedish Institute, in Abuja, Paris, Madrid, Berlin, Haag, and Stockholm, and in different Swedish embassies, among them Berlin, Bukarest och Hongkong, the Dutch, Norwegian and Israeli Ministries of Justice in i Amsterdam, Oslo och Jerusalem, the Council of the Baltic Sea States in Tallinn and in Vilnius, and the Eurojust, and also national social and administrative authorities. He has administered and led a judicial survey of all Swedish court decisions of cases of trafficking in human beings from 2009-2012. He is also co-author with PhD Ms Akila Taleb of a comparative study of the role of the prosecutor in French and Swedish legal systems published in Revue International de Droit Penal nr 82, ¾ 2011. He has published a number of opinion pieces, many on the subject of trafficking in human beings, in several major Swedish journals. He is also a member of the European Council’s GRETA committee with a mandate to supevise the participant state´s adherence to the European Anti-Trafficking Comvemtion.