Archive for the ‘Trafficking’ Category

By Marwaan Macan-Markar

In the wake of a new U.S. government report on human trafficking, human rights and migrant rights activists are calling on a South-east Asian regional bloc to review its polices toward this scourge to protect the group’s most vulnerable citizens – its women and children.

Such an appeal to the 10 members of the Association of South-east Asian Nations (ASEAN) stems from the way human trafficking is viewed by this bloc, currently racing ahead to create a rules-based community that would closely resemble the European Union.

ASEAN’s narrow definition of what constitutes human trafficking and how it should be combated was revealed last year. It came after all members of the 43-year-old bloc endorsed its new charter to be a “more rules-based, effective and people-centred organisation” to become an ASEAN Community by 2015.

ASEAN’s members include Brunei, Burma (or Myanmar), Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.

To achieve this quest of regional unity, leaders of the 10 countries endorsed the creation of three pillars to build on: a political security community, an economic community and a social and cultural community.

In doing so, ASEAN placed human trafficking as a security challenge and labour migration as a social and cultural challenge.

“The separation of migration and trafficking into different areas reveals a lack of understanding about the problem,” says Phil Robertson, deputy director at the Asia division for Human Rights Watch, a New York-based global rights lobby. “If ASEAN wants to get its act together on trafficking, it needs to deal with migration and trafficking together.”

ASEAN is fortunate that the U.S. State Department’s annual trafficking in persons report, released on Jun. 14, does not rank regional blocs, Robertson remarks. “If they grade ASEAN as a region, they would have to give it a Tier 3 rating.”

The U.S. government’s report, published for the past 10 years, has become a benchmark to assess the scourge of human trafficking and what governments across the world are doing to protect the victims, prosecute the abusers and prevent the spread of the traffickers’ network. The worst ranked countries earn a ‘Tier 3’ rating, while those with a success rate are listed as ‘Tier 1’ countries.

Washington’s ‘Trafficking in Persons Report 2010’ has been far from flattering for ASEAN, which is trying to reinvent itself from its original mission – as a bulwark against the spread of communism in the region – and appear more meaningful to its over 550 million citizens, some four million of whom have been forced to seek jobs in neighbouring countries. Nine ASEAN countries joined a global list of notoriety, where human trafficking is rampant. Military-ruled Burma was ranked among the worst offenders by this 10th annual report, a position shared with other countries like North Korea and Saudi Arabia, where little has been done to protect children, women and men from human trafficking networks.

Cambodian children forced to sell sweets and flowers on the streets of Thai cities, and Burmese women forced into prostitution in Malaysia are among the disturbing cases singled out in the report.

Singapore and Thailand, two of the strongest U.S. allies in the region, were placed on the ‘Tier 2 Watch List’, suggesting that they had regressed from last year. Other countries in the region ranked likewise for clear evidence of human trafficking were Laos, Philippines, Vietnam and Malaysia, which had been in the worst tier last year.

Indonesia, the region’s giant, and Cambodia, one of the region’s poorest, were placed among the ‘Tier 2’ countries. “Indonesia is a major source country, and to lesser extent a destination and transit country for women, children and men who are subjected to trafficking in persons, specifically forced prostitution and forced labour,” the report reveals.

Burma was described likewise. “Many men, women, and children who migrate abroad for work in Thailand, Malaysia, China, Bangladesh, India and South Korea are trafficked into conditions of forced or bonded labour or commercial sexual exploitation,” the report notes.

The affluent city-state of Singapore, on the other hand, is a “destination country for women and girls subjected to trafficking in persons, specifically forced prostitution, and for some migrant workers in conditions that may be indicative of forced labour,” the report adds.

Thailand and Cambodia share similar trends as a source, transit and destination country for victims of human trafficking. “The government of Thailand does not fully comply with the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking,” the report states while acknowledging that Bangkok was “making significant steps to do so.”

The Singapore and Thai governments have fired back at Washington. “(The report) is rather puzzling because the U.S. has not satisfactorily explained how it arrived at its conclusions,” the island’s foreign ministry spokesman said in a statement released to the media. “Let me say that the (report) is more a political ritual than an objective study.”

Bangkok echoed similar sentiments. “Thailand doubts the credibility of the U.S. report because this came out despite our efforts to provide further updates,” a Thai foreign ministry spokesman was quoted as saying in the local media on Thursday.

Such reactions confirm the wide gulf between how the U.S. government views human trafficking and how ASEAN countries do. “The U.S. government has a broad definition of what trafficking means, including sex trafficking, labour trafficking and forced labour,” says Sinapan Samydorai, convenor of the Task Force on ASEAN Migrant Workers, a coalition of non-government organisations.

“ASEAN countries like Singapore see trafficking as only sex trafficking. Left out is the whole area of labour trafficking,” he said during a telephone interview from the city-state. “ASEAN countries also place a greater burden on victims of intra-regional trafficking to prove they have been trafficked or face deportation. This is unfair on the victims.”

By Chad Andro

Whether it is the shocking statistics of 300,000 child soldiers worldwide, the more than two million children killed in conflict in the last two decades, an estimated 80 thousand children that die annually from violence from within the family in just one continent, or the 797,500 children a year under the age of 18 in the United States alone that were reported missing with the possibility of being trafficked for sex or labor, these are all statistics on how children throughout the world today are suffering through mental or physical abuse.

Youth for Human Rights President, Dustin McGahee, is asking youth across the world who can make a difference to speak out on June 4, International Day of Innocent Children Victims of Aggression, to help those who can’t speak for themselves.

“This is the time for us, the youth of today, to raise our voices and make a difference,” says McGahee. “As long as we wait for someone else to do it, the job doesn’t get done. As long as we tell ourselves that we have plenty of time to make a difference in the future, millions of people continue to be pushed down into ways of life we could not imagine.

“Every day you wait, 270 more children IN THE UNITED STATES alone become victims of human trafficking, and may never again see a life with freedom again. Every hour you wait, more than 1,400 children die of starvation and preventable diseases each hour.

“How can we, the Youth of Today, guarantee our freedom, our freedom to sing our songs, our freedom to dance, our freedom to express ourselves with the way we dress or the way we comb our hair, when most of the world doesn’t have their own freedoms.

“Freedom is not self-protecting. It is something that must be constantly taught, promoted, and fought for. And we, the youth of today, are the ones who can do that. We are the voice.

“We who have the freedom, have the responsibility. We who have the knowledge, have the power to change the lives of millions around the world.

“We, the youth of today, are the voice for the millions of children who are stolen from their homes and forced to a life of slavery. As these children had their voices stolen from them.

“We are the voice for the 300,000 child soldiers who have a shot at the enemy but no shot at life.

“We are the voice for the 100,000 million children not in school who dream of freedom but can’t spell it.

“Whatever our race, nationality, religion, and whatever other differences we may appear to have, we all have Human Rights, especially the children.

“We all share the responsibility to tell the world about human rights for children around the world. We all share the responsibility to put these rights into action for all children in every country.

“We, the youth of today, can be the voice to speak out aggression against innocent children. We, the youth of today, must tell the world, that all children have a right to grow up without violence.”

In 1982, The United Nations commemorated June 4 of each year as the International Day of Innocent Children Victims of Aggression due to the violence children receive in conflict areas, but child victims of aggression is much more widespread than only areas of conflict. Today, the purpose of this day is to acknowledge the pain suffered by children throughout the world who are the victims of physical, mental and emotional abuse. But Youth for Human Rights President, McGahee, doesn’t want to just acknowledge the abuse, he wants people to speak out against the abuse, so that children will no longer have to suffer.
Youth for Human Rights of Florida is a non-profit group that educates youth about the 30 Human Rights as written by the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights both in and out of the classroom. The Youth for Human Rights has a program that is designed to present the subject of human rights in multimedia formats suitable for all ages, the materials include “The Story of Human Rights,” a documentary video that illustrates the history of human rights through the ages; booklets; public service announcements that educate youth and adults on the 30 articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

27 May 2010

By Miriam Mannak, IPS

A fierce debate has erupted over claims that the 2010 Soccer World Cup will fuel the trafficking of women from African and other countries to South Africa for sexual exploitation during the cup, which starts on Jun 11.

The “Stop 2010 Human Trafficking” campaign being run in South Africa predicts that 100,000 women will fall victim to human traffickers during the World Cup and be dragged into the sex industry. The campaign is an initiative of STOP, a non-profit Christian alliance.

Dr Chandré Gould, senior researcher at the Institute for Security Studies (ISS) and author of ‘‘Selling Sex in Cape Town: Sex Work and Human Trafficking in a South African City”, dismisses the campaign’s message. According to her, the figures are severely inflated.

“Prior to the previous World Cup in 2006, 40,000 women were expected to be trafficked to Germany for sexual purposes,” she said at an ISS public seminar in Cape Town, South Africa, on May 24. ISS is a pan-African policy research think tank concerned with human security.

“The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) later found no increase of human trafficking during the event and that the number of 40,000 victims was unfounded. Neither is there proof to link big sporting events and human trafficking.

“We don’t know what is going to happen in South Africa but there is no reason to believe that the situation will differ from Germany. There will be six times less visitors in South Africa compared to the 2006 World Cup but some people still put the predicted number of trafficked persons at double the prediction for the 2006 cup.”

Gould noted that the problem of human trafficking generally is being overestimated. “Many media reports are based on improbable numbers that are built on insufficient data which are repeated in reports.

“For instance, UNICEF (the United Nations Children’s Fund) in 2005 repeated a claim that human trafficking was beginning to rival the drugs and arms trade as it was generating more than 10 billion dollars in revenue.

“If you look at where this number comes from, you realise that it was a mistake made by someone sitting at a desk at the U.S. department of state. This mistake is being repeated over and over again because it looks like a credible number and the media love numbers.”

But investigative journalist Mark Thomas questioned Gould’s statements at the seminar, based on his research into human trafficking and the South African sex industry.

“I would agree that nobody truly knows how much is generated by the trade but it is wrong to dismiss any suggested figure out of hand,” he told IPS. Thomas is news editor at the South African investigative news magazine Noseweek.

“There is not a single source that has stated with certainty that the annual revenue is 10 billion dollars. The UN, the Council of the European Union, the IOM, and several anti-human trafficking organisations all use the term ‘estimated to generate revenue of between five and nine billion dollars per year’.”

The gap between the two figures can be explained by the concealed nature of human trafficking, Thomas explained.

“Payments for services associated with illicit activities remain hidden. No single trafficker, some of whom have seemingly legitimate businesses, would ever declare amounts received as a result of illicit activities in their financial records,” he added.

Gould stated that none of the research of the past decade showed an increase in trafficking of women to South Africa. “The IOM over the past six years has found and assisted 315 victims of human trafficking. That is all. That is the extent of the problem as we know it.

“One needs to keep in mind that the IOM has trained over 10,000 law enforcement officials in Southern Africa to deal with human trafficking and there is a 24-hour hotline.”

Gould’s own research, published in 2008, found 1,209 sex workers in Cape Town, of whom 964 worked in brothels and 245 on the streets.

Out of 164 people interviewed, “we discovered eight cases of women that might have been trafficked. The brothel owners we interviewed said they and their clientele had no interest in foreign women. This could be related to the fear of being raided by the department of home affairs,” Gould explained.

Thomas questioned these claims. “In my research in Cape Town in 2009, I spoke to many women who were trafficked. For one story I spoke to 24 who were from Nigeria, Cameroon, Zimbabwe, Rwanda, Uganda, Kenya and Zambia. A few were reluctant to disclose their nationalities.

“This was accomplished within the first two weeks of research,” he added.

But “not all foreign women that are working in the South African sex industry have been trafficked”, Marlise Richter, associate researcher at the forced migration studies programme at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, said at the seminar.

“Many of them come from Zimbabwe or the Democratic Republic of the Congo as economic migrants and out of their own free will. They do not see it as a life-long career but as a way to make some money before returning home,” she said.

Thomas also disagreed with Richter’s statements. “You don’t need a gun pointing at your head to be forced to do what you don’t like. The women she mentioned might not have been trafficked but they have been forced into this industry, as is shown by the fact that they see it as the only way to earn income. Most of them don’t do this work voluntary.”