By Feizal Samath
COLOMBO, Feb 15 1999 (IPS)

Women activists in South Asia have slammed a draft regional convention against trafficking of women and children, saying it was flawed and did not cover key issues like migrant workers or forced marriages.

Dr Radhika Coomaraswamy, UN Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women, said there were many flaws in the convention, with one of the problems being that it put women and children together.

“Women’s movements think differently. They feel that women’s issues are human rights issues, while children’s issues are protection issues,” she told a meeting in Colombo last week to discuss concerns by women’s groups in South Asia over the proposed convention.

Women’s groups in South Asia have taken umbrage to the SAARC (South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation) Convention on Preventing and Combating Trafficking in Women and Children for Prostitution, which was discussed by officials at last July’s summit of South Asian leaders in Colombo.

Officials have said the draft is likely to be endorsed by the leaders when they meet again in Kathmandu, Nepal’s capital, in November this year.

“Since Nepal has the biggest problem with regard to trafficking of women and children, regional legislators have thought it fit to finalise this convention in Kathmandu,” said Nimalka Fernando, chairperson of Sri Lanka’s Movement for Inter- racial Justice and Equality (MIRJE), and one of the main organisers of the Colombo meeting last Friday.

“We were never consulted on the proposed convention and it was only by chance that we discovered that South Asian countries were proposing a convention of this sort,” said Fernando, also Sri Lanka chairperson of the Tokyo-based International Movement Against All Forms of Discrimination and Racism (IMADR) which sponsored the meeting.

She said the promoters of the legislation – foreign ministries and government agencies dealing in women’s issues – had failed to consult Coomaraswamy, a Sri Lankan and an acknowledged UN expert on women’s issues who lives in Sri Lanka.

She said the SAARC secretariat in Kathmandu had not responded to requests made by regional women’s groups to listen to its views.

The Colombo meeting, part of a series of meetings in the region to seek women’s views on the convention, drew activists from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal.

Fernando told IPS that a group headed by Coomaraswamy would lobby governments to consider representation from women. “We will also try to persuade South Asian leaders not to endorse the document at the November summit, till women’s groups are heard,” she said.

According to the eight-paged draft convention, its purpose is to promote cooperation among the seven member states, including Bhutan and the Maldives, to effectively deal with the various aspects of prevention, interdiction and suppression of trafficking in women and children.

It said parties to the convention would take effective measures to ensure that trafficking in any form is an offence under their respective criminal laws and impose suitable punishment.

Coomaraswamy said the draft has been prepared primarily as a law and order document for criminal law purposes and in that, trafficking has only been linked to prostitution. “What about migrant workers or those who are taken elsewhere and forced into marriages? There should be one tight document covering all these aspects of trafficking,” the UN rapporteur noted.

Thousands of women, mostly from Sri Lanka, who work in the Arab Gulf states as housemaids complain of ill-treatment, physical and sexual abuse. Forced marriages are a common phenomena in South Asia.

Coomaraswamy said that under the draft section on offences, human rights have not been thought of. “They are invisible. Therefore no remedies are given,” she said.

The convention does not deal with remedies for women rescued from prostitution. In most cases these crimes are not prosecuted because prostitution is linked to organised crime and the victim cannot fight against it without protection, she said.

The UN rapporteur said that though victims, were vital for prosecution, they were scared to give evidence for fear of exposing their identity. She said that in Europe, witnesses’

could remain incognito, by giving evidence from a closed room and questioned so that their identity remains a secret.

She said there was provision for repatriation in the convention, but women did not appear to have a choice in the matter. Most of the women leave their homes when young and are forced into prostitution in another country.

“Why can’t they be given the choice of deciding – whether to go back or stay since social customs are such that once you become a sex worker you are ostracised and may not be taken back into your community,” she added.

She said the draft convention appeared to be based on a 1949 UN Convention, and didn’t take into consideration all the developments in the last decade. The UN convention for the Suppression of Trafficking in Persons and the Exploitation of Prostitution of Others was enacted in 1949.

Dr Hameena Hossein, from the Law and Mediation Centre in Bangladesh which provides legal aid for women, said she agreed with Coomaraswamy’s assertion and noted that the draft was “just a cut and paste job of the 1949 convention.”

She said that South Asian leaders had, too late in the day, opened their eyes to the problem of trafficking in comparison to women’s groups who have been discussing these issues for many years and also made representations on these matters.

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