RIGHTS: World Gaining in Fight Against Human Trafficking – U.S.

By Jim Lobe Reprint | | Print |

Jim Lobe

Washington, Jun 14 2004 (IPS) - Many of the world’s governments appear to be making progress in fighting the trafficking of humans across international borders, according to the latest of the State Department’s annual Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report, released here Monday.

It cited nearly 8,000 prosecutions against alleged traffickers in the past year and almost 3,000 convictions, which included a number of major crime figures, notably in Britain and Macedonia, sentenced to prison terms.

The report, which this year covers the trafficking situation in 140 countries, estimated that between 600,000 and 800,000 people were trafficked across borders each year, of whom about 80 percent are female and one-half are children. About 70 percent of all females, it added, are trafficked for sexual exploitation.

Another two million to four million people are believed to have been trafficked within countries, according to the report, which is mandated under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) of 2000, which was amended last year to include additional provisions.

The report estimated the number of people trafficked into the United States as between 14,500 and 17,500, significantly lower than the 50,000 figure that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had offered in a ground-breaking study five years ago. John Miller, the Bush administration’s special adviser on trafficking in persons, said U.S. analysts were using a new methodology that resulted in the lower estimate.

Introducing the report, which runs 270 pages, Secretary of State Colin Powell announced that some countries that last year had been deemed ”tier 3” nations – countries that do not meet congressionally prescribed ”minimum standards” for addressing the problem – had sufficiently improved their performance to be move to ”tier 2”.

But 10 countries either remained in or fell into the tier 3 category: Bangladesh, Burma, Cuba, Ecuador, Equatorial Guinea, Guyana, North Korea, Sierra Leone, Sudan and Venezuela. All could be subject to sanctions, including the loss of certain kinds of U.S. aid or even U.S. opposition to pending loans at international financial agencies, such as the World Bank, if they do not, in Washington’s judgement, make good-faith efforts to address the problem over the next three months.

Forty-two other countries were placed on the ”tier 2 watch list”, defined as nations that are in danger of falling into tier 3 next year.

They include Latin America’s Bolivia, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Paraguay and Peru; and the Caribbean nations of Belize, Jamaica and Suriname.

Asian countries placed on the watch list include Japan, the wealthiest country on the list, India, Kazakhstan, Laos, Pakistan, the Philippines, Tajikistan, Thailand and Vietnam, while European nations are Azerbaijan, Cyprus, Estonia, Greece, Russia, Serbia and Turkey.

Fifty-two tier 2 – as opposed to tier 2 watch list – countries are those that Washington says fail to meet minimum standards but are making significant efforts to comply, while 25 tier 1 countries – of which Ghana is the only developing nation – meet minimum standards.

The annual TIP report, as well as the TVPA on which it is based, came out of a coalition of traditional human rights activists and Christian Right groups that have become increasingly interested in foreign policy over the past decade. Both sides were particularly affected by the sharp rise in sex trafficking during the 1990s, when the collapse of economies throughout the eastern bloc nations resulted in widespread poverty and a loss of status and security for women and girls. Many were trafficked across borders into Western Europe, the United States and Japan.

President George W Bush has also expressed concern about the issue, persuading Congress to spend more than 100 million dollars a year to combat trafficking, in major part by working with other governments to toughen their laws, train prosecutors and investigators, and provide help to agencies that try to protect women and girls from recruitment by traffickers.

Under the TVPA, the Bush administration has more than doubled the number of prosecutions of people suspected of trafficking since 2001 to some four-dozen, aided in part by a TVPA provision that offers permanent residence status to trafficking victims who have suffered severe abuse, on the condition that they co-operate with prosecutors.

U.S. authorities have also begun to prosecute citizens for sex crimes against children that they commit overseas. The 2003 Protect Act has already been invoked against defendants for sex crimes against minors in Cambodia, Russia and the Philippines, and dozens of prosecutions are currently pending, according to a recent report by the ‘New York Times’.

Under the TVPA, the State Department is required to file a report on countries of origin, transit or destination for a significant number of victims, defined as 100 or more. The victims must be subject to ”severe forms of trafficking”, which means they must have been drafted into involuntary servitude through the use of force, fraud or coercion.

If a person is under 18 years of age and is induced to perform a commercial sex act, that too constitutes a ”severe form of trafficking”, according to the law.

In his remarks, Miller stressed that a number of countries were not included in the report, primarily because not enough is known about them. The 140 nations in this year’s report marked an increase of 16 from 2003.

The law sets forth several minimum standards for assessing a government’s performance, including a ban on severe forms of trafficking, prosecution of those involved with trafficking and penalties that are not only commensurate with the offence but sufficiently harsh to deter others from committing similar crimes. It also sets forth 10 criteria to guide the State Department’s assessment.

The watch list, which is an innovation over previous reports, applies to countries where the number of victims of severe forms of trafficking is either ”very significant” or ”is significantly increasing”; where such variables as investigations, prosecutions and convictions of trafficking crimes or of increased aid to victims have not increased; or where a country has failed to follow through on previous commitments.

The latest report also includes a section on ”international best practices” to fight trafficking.

It praises a new programme in Panama to discourage six tourism; another in Colombia to intercept potential trafficking victims before they board international flights; new initiatives to combat sex trafficking, including police action against customers in Sweden and Madrid; and efforts in Ghana to bring children who have been sold to traffickers back to their parents in exchange for greater government assistance in obtaining job training, credit and school fees.