Poverty plays a huge role in the trafficking of women and girls in West Africa. Credit: CC by 2.0/Linda De Volder

By Issa Sikiti da Silva
COTONOU, Benin, May 3 2019 (IPS)

On a bus in Cotonou, Benin’s commercial capital, four Nigerian girls aged between 15 and 16 sit closely together as they are about to embark on the last part of their journey to Mali, where they are told that their new husbands, whom they never have met, await them.

They started off from their homes in Eastern Nigeria where their parents had reportedly agreed that they be “commissioned” to become the wives of Nigerian men living in Mali.

“Four compatriots asked me to bring them young wives because they want to get married. I’m sure they will be happy,” a human smuggler, who only identifies himself as Wiseman, tells IPS as the bus prepares to depart for Bamako, Mali’s capital. IPS is not allowed to speak to the young girls, who appear anxious.

When asked if the girls’ parents are aware they have to travel to Mali, Wiseman says: “I negotiated with them and gave them something as a down payment for their dowries, which will surely help them [the parents] start a small business or buy seeds for farming. These kids should count themselves lucky because they will work and perform wives’ duties, so their lives should improve big time.”

But nobody knows the real intentions of the men who ”commissioned” these girls. Or if they exist.

Pathfinders Justice Initiative, an international non-government organisation dedicated to the prevention of modern-day sex slavery, says Nigeria is a source, transit and destination country when it comes to human trafficking with Benin City, in Nigeria’s Edo State, being an internationally-recognised sex trafficking hub. 

Nigeria ranks 32 out of 167 countries with the highest number of slaves (1,38 million), according to the 2018 Global Slavery Index report. While Nigeria has the institutional framework and laws against trafficking, at least one million people are trafficked there every year, according to the country’s National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP).

NAPTIP, working in collaboration with Malian authorities, recently said that nearly 20,000 Nigerian girls were forced into prostitution in Mali. The girls were said to be working in hotels and nightclubs after being sold to prostitution rings by human traffickers.

Children the most vulnerable

In West Africa, children remain the most vulnerable to trafficking.

The latest Global Report On Trafficking In Persons by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) found that young boys and girls where among those most  trafficked in the region. 

At the end of April, Interpol announced that it rescued 216 trafficked victim—including 157 children—from Benin, Burkina Faso, Niger, Nigeria, and Togo. Interpol is part of a global task force formed to address human trafficking.

Some of the trafficking victims were working as sex workers in Benin and Nigeria, while others worked all day in markets and at various eating places. Some were as young as 11 and had been beaten, subject to abuse, and told they would never see their families again.

Forty-seven people were arrested.

“Many of the children are shipped actually into these markets to carry out forced labour. These are organised crime groups who are motivated by making money. They don’t care about the children forced into prostitution, working in terrible conditions, living on the streets, they are all after the money,” Interpol’s Director of Organised and Emerging Crime Paul Stanfield said in a video.

Benin, the transit stop for traffickers

Benin, a low-income country, has always been a transit route for west African migrants looking to irregularly make their way to Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, and finally to Europe.

The city of Cotonou appears to be a huge transit route through which women and girls trafficked to North and West Africa pass as they are transported to various countries of their destination. While Togo, Burkina Faso, Benin and Mali have laws against child trafficking, nothing covers trafficking in persons above the age of 18, according to the UNODC report. Niger has no laws against trafficking.

The Economic Community of West African States’ policy of free movement of goods and people seems to make this easier as corrupt immigration officers at border posts look away in exchange for a few euros. When IPS asks Wiseman about border controls, he brushes aside the issue, saying he knows “how to handle them”.  

When asked if he is responsible for the girls’ welfare, Wiseman replies: “I’m not a social worker, I’m a businessman and a helper. I help people to get good wives and lift the girls’ families out of poverty in exchange for money. The rest is history.”

When the incident about the Nigerian girls is described to Hassan Badarou, a community-based caregiver and religious leader from Benin, he says “they could be used as sex slaves by those men or sold to crime syndicates to serve as prostitutes in Mali or even as far as in North Africa.”

“It’s a pity parents allow their children to just leave the country in exchange for a few dollars. All of this wouldn’t have happened if they weren’t poor,” he says.

Poverty, culture and child labour

Poverty plays a huge role in the trafficking of women and girls in the region. But so too does culture.

In 2014, a female friend of Suzie’s family came to collect the then 12-year-old from her home in northern Benin.

“She promised to help me attend school after working at her home for one year, but she didn’t,” Suzie tells IPS in the local language, Fon, through a translator.

“Things started to go wrong when I started to remind her about that. She stopped paying me my salary and increased the workload and cut my meals down from two to one per day. And she started beating up me every time I protested,” the 16-year-old who lives in Cotonou tells IPS.

As time went by, the women’s male family members, who lived in the same house, started to make sexual advances towards Suzie. She refused the advances but eventually ran away because she could no longer bear the situation. 

No police please

When asked why she doesn’t report the incidents to the police, she says: “I can’t do that. The woman is like my aunt so I couldn’t do it as this would have brought a conflict between the women’s family and ours back home.”

Badarou, the religious leader, explains that he has mediated in cases like Suzie’s.

“If you see the way these women ill-treat these girls, it should make you cry. I have documented many cases of abuse and have tried to mediate between some of these women and the girls.”

But he’s never reported any of these cases, however abusive, to the police.

“The only thing you cannot do is to report these cases to the police. We are all brothers and sisters of this country and we believe in solving our problems in harmony and peace through dialogue. Besides, it’s not our culture to report everything to the police. I blame West African governments for allowing this thing to go on and on to the extent of becoming a cultural norm institutionalised deep in the fabric of society. It’s now hard to break it,” he says.

Badarou explains that the actions are cultural.

“In the face of this deeply-entrenched culture of ”helping each other” by ”handing over” your girls to someone well established who is living in the cities, even the United Nations and children’s organisations sometimes have no choice but to turn a blind eye. I’m not saying they are not doing anything about it, but you can’t break up someone’s culture, especially in a region such as this where grinding poverty rules,” he says.

Richard Dossou seems to agree. He tells IPS that his uncle’s friend, a father of 18 children, is looking for “Good Samaritans” from Benin to take in some of his girls as he is unable to provide for them. 

“I’m planning to travel to their village to negotiate with him with a view of taking even one, not as a wife, but as a maid. Then we will see how it will lead us. We help each other like this to fend off poverty and misery in this region,” Dossou says.

While Benin’s poverty hovers at about 40 percent, a report released in 2018  by the World Poverty Clock said in Nigeria a total of 86.9 million people are living in extreme poverty.

The fine line between cultural norms and child trafficking

Asked if this West African practice of “handing over” girls is a cultural norm of lifting families out of poverty, Jakub Sobik, communications manager for London-based Anti-Slavery International, tells IPS via email: “What you describe above are cases of child trafficking, when children are being recruited or harboured with a view of exploiting them.”

“Slavery doesn’t occur in a vacuum, it is underpinned by many factors, including poverty, discrimination, lack of access to education and decent job opportunities, the lack of rule of law, as well as practices that are culturally accepted in societies,” he explains.

He says that it is often the case that parents are “deceived about the conditions their children will be offered, and send them away in a genuine belief that they will get a better chance of education and life opportunities in surroundings of cities and perhaps better-off societal circles.” 

He adds that in some societies children working is culturally accepted, because it has been the norm for generations. “We have a lot to do to change that and offer children childhoods, education and opportunities in lives they deserve.”

As the bus continues on the final journey that is meant to lift the Nigerian girls out of ”poverty” to ‘’freedom”; back in Cotonou Suzie wanders the city’s dark streets hand in hand with a Zemidjan—a motorcycle taxi driver—who appears to be aged between 40 and 50 and whom she describes as her boyfriend.

The origins of the GSN come from the endeavours of the Joint Declaration of Religious Leaders signed on 2 December 2014. Religious leaders of various faiths, gathered to work together “to defend the dignity and freedom of the human being against the extreme forms of the globalization of indifference, such us exploitation, forced labour, prostitution, human trafficking” and so forth.

Excerpt:

Children from rural areas and disempowered homes are ideal targets for trafficking in India and elsewhere. Credit: Neeta Lal/IPS

By Tharanga Yakupitiyage
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 9 2019 (IPS)

Human trafficking is on the rise and it is more “horrific” than ever, a United Nations agency found.

In a new report examining patterns in human trafficking, the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) found that the global trend has increased steadily since 2010 around the world.

“Human trafficking has taken on horrific dimensions as armed groups and terrorists use it to spread fear and gain victims to offer as incentives to recruit new fighters,” said UNODC’s Executive Director Yury Fedotov.

Asia and the Americas saw the largest increase in identified victims but the report notes that this may also reflect an improved capacity to identify and report data on trafficking.

Women and girls are especially vulnerable, making up 70 percent of detected victims worldwide. While they are mainly adult women, girls are increasingly targeted by traffickers.

According to the 2018 Global Report on Trafficking in Persons, girls account for 23 percent of all trafficking victims, up from 21 percent in 2014 and 10 percent in 2004.

UNODC also highlighted that conflict has increased the vulnerability of such populations to trafficking as armed groups were found to use the practice to finance activities or increase troops.   

Activist and U.N. Goodwill Ambassador Nadia Murad was among thousands of Yazidi women and girls who was abducted from her village and sold into sexual slavery by the Islamic State (IS) in Iraq, a tactic used in order to boost recruitment and reward soldiers. 

Murad recently received the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize, dedicating it to survivors of sexual violence and genocide.

“Survivors deserve a safe and secure pathway home or safe passage elsewhere. We must support efforts to focus on humanity, and overcome political and cultural divisions. We must not only imagine a better future for women, children and persecuted minorities, we must work consistently to make it happen – prioritising humanity, not war,” she said.

“The fact remains that the only prize in the world that can restore our dignity is justice and the prosecution of criminals,” Murad added.

Sexual exploitation continues to be the main purpose for trafficking, account for almost 60 percent, while forced labor accounts for approximately 34 percent of all identified cases.

Three-quarters of all female victims are trafficked for sexual exploitation globally.

The report also found for the first time that the majority of trafficked victims are trafficked within their own countries of citizenship.

The share of identified domestic victims has more than doubled from 27 percent in 2010 to 58 percent in 2016.

This may be due to improved border controls at borders preventing cross-border trafficking as well as a greater awareness of the different forms of trafficking, the report notes.

However, convictions have only recently started to grow and in many countries, conviction rates still remain worryingly low.

In Europe, conviction rates have dropped from 988 traffickers convicted in 2011 to 742 people in 2016.

During that same time period, the number of detected victims increased from 4,248 to 4,429.

There also continue to be gaps in knowledge and information, particularly in certain parts of Africa, Middle East, and East Asia which still lack sufficient capacity to record and share data on human trafficking.

“This report shows that we need to step up technical assistance and strengthen cooperation, to support all countries to protect victims and bring criminals to justice, and achieve the Sustainable Development Goals,” Fedotov said at the report’s launch.

Adopted in 2015, the landmark SDGs include ambitious targets including the SDG target 16.2 which calls on member states to end abuse, exploitation, trafficking and all forms of violence and torture against children.

SDG indicator 16.2.2 asks member states to measure the number of victims of human trafficking per 100,000 population and disaggregated by sex, age, and form of exploitation, reflecting the importance of improving data recording, collection, and dissemination.

“The international community needs to…stop human trafficking in conflict situations and in all our societies where this terrible crime continues to operate in the shadows,” Fedotov said.

“I urge the international community to heed Nadia [Murad]’s call for justice,” he added.

Coca leaf growers from the traditional region of Yungas, in northwest Bolivia, surround the legislature in the city of La Paz, demanding an expansion of the legal cultivation area by the new law. Credit: Franz Chávez.

By Franz Chávez
LA PAZ, Mar 9 2017 (IPS)

A new bill in Bolivia, which will allow the amount of land allocated to producing coca to be increased from 12,000 to 22,000 hectares, modifying a nearly three-decade coca production policy, has led to warnings from independent voices and the opposition that the measure could fuel drug trafficking.

Since 1988, the amount of land authorised for growing coca has been 12,000 hectares, according to Law 1,008 of the Regulation of Coca and Controlled Substances, which is line with the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs.

This United Nations Convention pointed the way to a phasing-out of the traditional practice among indigenous peoples in the Andean region of chewing coca leaves, which was encouraged during the Spanish colonial period, when the native population depended heavily on coca leaves for energy as they were forced to extract minerals from deep mine pits.

But the traditional use of coca leaves instead grew in Bolivia. According to the president of the lower house of Congress, Gabriela Montaño, some 3.3 million of the country’s 11 million people currently use coca in traditional fashion.

Citing these figures, lawmakers passed the new General Law on Coca on Feb. 24. The bill is now awaiting President Evo Morales’ signature.“This law is making available to the drug trafficking trade more than 11,000 metric tons of coca leaves per year, the average yield from the 8,000 hectares which the law grants to producers.” – Public letter signed by local intellectuals.

Morales originally rose to prominence as the leader of the seven unions of coca leaf growers in the central region of Chapare, in the department of Cochabamba, fighting against several conservative governments that wanted to eradicate coca cultivation, in accordance with Law 1,008 and the U.N. Convention.

The law had enabled the anti-drug forces, financed by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), to wage an all-out war against coca cultivation. The struggle against the law catapulted Morales as a popular figure and later as a politician and the country’s first indigenous president, in January 2006.

Montaño estimates that annual production amounts to 30,900 metric tons, 24,785 of which are used for medicinal purposes, in infusions or rituals, she said.

The remaining 6,115 tons are processed into products, or used for research and export, she said.

Assessing compliance with the 1961 Convention, medical doctor and researcher Franklin Alcaraz told IPS that in South America, only Ecuador has managed to eradicate the practice of chewing coca leaves.

On Feb. 28, some fifty intellectuals signed a public letter titled: “Public Rejection of the General Law on Coca”, which stated that “this law is making available to the drug trafficking trade more than 11,000 metric tons of coca leaves per year, the average yield from the 8,000 hectares which the law grants to producers.”

Bolivia was one of the 73 signatory countries to the 1961 Convention where clause “e” of article 49 declared that the practice of chewing coca leaves would be banned within 25 years of the (1964) implementation of the accord.

In January 2013, Bolivia recovered the right to practice traditional coca chewing, when it won a special exemption to the 1961 Convention. Its request was only voted against by 15 of the 183 members of the U.N., including Germany, Japan, Mexico, Russia, the United States and the United Kingdom.

Wives of coca leaf farmers from Yungas during a vigil at the gates of the La Paz police station, where dozens of leaders were taken, accused of inciting disturbance during the demonstrations held to demand an expansion of the legal cultivation area in their region in northwest Bolivia. Credit: Franz Chávez.

In a January 2014 communique, the representative of the United Nations Office On Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Antonino De Leo, stated that the exemption “only applies to the national territory.”

The new bill repeals the first 31 articles of the 1988 law and legalises 22,000 hectares for cultivation – 10,000 more than before.

In practice, the new legal growing area is just slightly larger than the 20,200 hectares of coca which UNODC counted in 2015, according to its July 2016 report on the country.

President Morales has defended the increase in the legal cultivation area and reiterated his interest in carrying out an old project for the industrialisation of coca leaves.

On Feb. 28, Morales expressed his support for the new bill and accused conservative governments of supporting the demonisation and criminalisation of coca leaf chewing at an international level.

Montaño said that in 2006, when Morales first took office, 17,000 hectares of coca were grown in the Chapare region. Ten years later, UNODC registered only 6,000 hectares devoted to coca production.

She said that under Morales, the reduction of coca crops has been negotiated and without violence, in contrast to the repression by conservative governments that generated “blood and mourning”.

Before Congress passed the law, coca producers from the semitropical region of Yungas, in the department of La Paz, held violent protests in the capital.

Between Feb. 17 and Feb. 23, hundreds of demonstrators surrounded Murillo square in La Paz, where the main buildings of the executive and legislative branches are located, demanding 300 additional hectares, on top of the 14,000 presently dedicated to coca in Yungas.

There are an estimated 33,000 coca farmers in Yungas, and 45,000 in Chapare.

In the midst of clashes with the police, destruction of public property and the arrest of at least 143 organisers, talks were held with the government, which ended up giving in to the demands.

The settlement also granted growers in the Chapare region an additional 1,700 hectares, on top of the 6,000 currently registered and monitored by UNODC.

Political analyst Julio Aliaga told IPS that traditional use of coca leaves only requires 6,000 hectares, rather than the 22,000 hectares that the government of the leftist Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) is about to legalise.

This figure of 6,000 hectares is drawn from a European Union study on demand for coca leaves in Bolivia for infusions, chewing or in rituals. This study was not mentioned by the authorities or MAS legislators.

“Bolivia has a large surplus of coca which goes toward drug trafficking. The cocaine ends up in Africa, Europe and Russia, and the new colossal market of China,” Aliaga said.

Samuel Doria Medina, the leader of the opposition centre-left National Unity (UN), questioned the 80 per cent expansion of the lawful cultivation area and told IPS that the measure is “a clear sign of an interest in increasing the production of narcotic drugs.“

“The new policy will be indefensible before multilateral drug control agencies,“ since the UNODC certified that “94 per cent of the coca production from Chapare goes toward the production of cocaine,” he said.

In his opinion, the new law provides an incentive for the drug trafficking mafias to sell drugs in Bolivia, “with the well-known violence that this business entails.”

Because of their biological wealth, Latin America and the Caribbean are a source and destination of trafficked species. In the photo, trafficked parrots in a cage after being seized. Credit: World Animal Protection

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Jun 2 2016 (IPS)

Although it violates the international conventions that regulate the wildlife trade, it is possible to go online and find websites to buy, for example, axolotl salamanders (Ambystoma mexicanum) or spiny softshell turtles (Trionyx spiniferus).

These websites reflect new trends in the trafficking of plant and animal species, which help fuel the smuggling of wildlife and form part of the ‘Deep Web’, made up of pages that search engines cannot find.

Despite the magnitude of the damage to biodiversity, Latin America and the Caribbean have made scant progress in fighting wildlife trafficking. The theme of this year’s World Environment Day, celebrated on Jun. 5, is Go Wild for Life.“People have to be taught that they should not purchase wild animals or plants. That would be enough to cut down trafficking to sustainable levels.” -- Juan Carlos Cantú

Because of their biological wealth, Mexico, Central America and the Amazon rainforest – which is shared by Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, Suriname and Venezuela – are the main sources of trafficked plant and animal species in the region.

“Latin America represents significant criminal activity, because there are several countries considered megadiverse, which makes this region highly vulnerable to trafficking,” Roberto Vieto, with World Animal Protection, told IPS.

Vieto, who is wildlife campaigns officer for Latin America at the London-based international animal welfare organisation, said wildlife trafficking has seen a resurgence in the region, driven by online trade.

The World Wildlife Crime Report, published May 26 by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), said Mexico, Argentina, Chile and Venezuela headed the region in terms of seizures of trafficked wildlife in the 2004-2015 period.

This region accounted for 15 percent of global seizures, while North America represented 46 percent, the Asia-Pacific region 24 percent, Europe 14 percent and Africa one percent.

The seizures indicate that the main destinations for reptiles, mammals and birds trafficked from this region are the United States, Europe, and more recently, China.

UNODC reports that some 7,000 species have been discovered in seizures worldwide. And the European Union reported in February that wildlife trafficking generates anywhere between 8.9 and 22.25 billion dollars a year. That makes it one of the four main transnational criminal activities, along with drug, weapon and people trafficking.

Smuggling, forgery of documents, and the mixture of legal and illegal products are the favorite techniques used by traffickers of wild species. In the photo are small birds in tin cans and a cage, discovered during a seizure in Brazil. Credit: World Animal Protection

Wildlife seizures are an indicator of the scale of the phenomenon. To cite just one example, authorities in Mexico seized more than 200,000 specimens between 2007 and 2011 and arrested 294 suspects.

“The problem is very serious,” said Juan Carlos Cantú, the representative in Mexico of the U.S.-based Defenders of Wildlife. “For certain species, trafficking is the only threat they face. International trafficking is focused on endemic species, the rarest ones, the ones that are the most threatened by extinction.”

In Latin America, there are legal vacuums, and laws against wildlife trafficking are not always adequately enforced.

One illustration of this: in its first “National report on the traffick of wild animals”, published in 2014, the Brazilian organisation Renctas concluded that more than one million caimans – related to alligators – are poached every year in wilderness areas in Brazil, and their hides are taken to neighbouring countries for processing and export.

In 2015, Defenders of Wildlife stated in its report “Combating Wildlife Trafficking from Latin America to the United States” that the five most frequently seized animals in the region are queen conches, sea turtles, caimans, crocodiles and iguanas.

The lucrative Chinese market poses an enormous threat to species like the totoaba, sea cucumbers and sharks. The capture of the totoaba, a fish that is endemic to the Gulf of California in northwest Mexico, whose swim bladder is considered a delicacy in Chinese cuisine, is a death sentence for the vaquita (Phocoena sinus), a rare species of porpoise only found in the same area.

Traffickers often use legal documents to hide illegal activities or forged permits to smuggle specimens. As UNODC notes, certain markets are especially vulnerable to the infiltration of illegally sourced or trafficked wildlife.

In the photo, an inspector from Mexico’s federal environmental protection agency carries a box of parrots seized in a 2011 operation against the trafficking of protected species of birds. Credit: PROFEPA

Smugglers and their clients take advantage of legal gaps in the region. For example, in Brazil it is illegal to sell wild animals, but it is legal to own them if they were raised in captivity.

Sharks are the perfect illustration of incoherent and contradictory regulations and laws. Most Latin American nations allow them to be sold, but ban their capture for the purpose of removal of their fins, which are in high demand in Asia and provide an incentive to blur the distinction between the legal and illegal markets.

The global gendarme

The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), in effect since 1975, regulates more than 5,600 species of animals and 30,000 species of plants from overexploitation through international trade, in accordance with the degree of risk of extinction.

But the millions of species that aren’t covered by CITES can be illegally bred and raised and internationally traded.

Furthermore, national markets are also outside of the reach of the convention, if it cannot be proved that specimens or products have crossed international borders, in contravention of CITES.

In the case of Latin America, since at least 2010 most of the countries have not presented their biennial reports to CITES on how they are implementing the convention, despite the importance of oversight and monitoring in the fight against trafficking.

That gap is going to close, because in its annual meeting in Geneva in February, the CITES Standing Committee decided that its member states must provide statistical information every year on seizures, which will go into an annual report, the first of which will be published in October 2017.

Vieto and Cantú agree on the importance of raising public awareness so that people understand they must not buy wild animals. “Educational campaigns are needed to reduce the consumption of products, step up enforcement of existing regulations and laws, and bolster international cooperation,” to fill in gaps at a local level, said Vieto.

For Cantú, the key is reducing demand. “People have to be taught that they should not purchase wild animals or plants. That would be enough to cut down trafficking to sustainable levels,” he said.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

A modern ‘legal arsenal’ comprising the rule of law is the best weapon to combat crime and terror and to end the vicious circle of poverty, according to experts gathered in Doha, Qatar, for the Apr. 12-19 United Nations Congress on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice, organised by the Vienna-based United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

The International Organization for Victim Assistance has calculated that investing 0.1 per cent of the global gross domestic product in planning, training, developing, implementing and evaluating actions to prevent crime and bolster criminal justice systems would free up one trillion dollars by 2030 and would save hundreds of thousands of lives while fostering sustainable development.

UNODC said in a press release simultaneously issued in Vienna and Doha on Apr. 15 that several speakers from terrorism-afflicted States had shared their perspective on how to address the causes of that scourge.

To halt the spread of groups like Al-Qaida and Da’esh, and their crimes against humanity, the press release said, Iraq’s representative pleaded for a strategy that must include Security Council action and a guarantee of the implementation of that body’s resolutions.

It would also require stepping up international cooperation, particularly on freezing flows of funds and foreign fighters, and promoting the battle against organised crime groups operating behind “shell” companies.

Libya’s representative appealed for international assistance to recover its plundered assets, bolster border control and support his government’s endeavours to simultaneously promote stability while fighting against the presence of Da’esh. As Libya was a gateway to Europe, he said, what was happening in his country would have an impact on States around the world.

In fact, no country could claim to combat terrorism on its own, the press release quoted Morocco’s representative saying. He emphasised that international cooperation was essential. His country had introduced several reforms with the aim of creating a “legal arsenal” to tackle various forms of crime, including terrorism, smuggling of migrants and money-laundering, as well as to address the unique challenge of foreign fighters.

The best addition to that arsenal was regional and international cooperation, he said, noting that UNODC had the potential to help track down States that harboured terrorists and criminals or contributed to their activities.

Continuing, he highlighted that success in crime prevention and criminal justice did not depend on the number of security forces, but on the adoption of effective means to respond to multifaceted threats in a way that respected human rights. As such, Morocco had adopted a multi-pronged approach in its public policy to combat terrorist groups by “drying up” their funding through strong mandatory measures and protecting the country’s religious environment from excesses.

A number of speakers also called for action to make similar processes easier. Representing another view, the UNODC said, a speaker for Amnesty International called on the Congress to address human rights violations that resulted from “overzealous” policing, as well as the punishment of women, marginalised individuals, the poor and those transgressing social norms.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Indonesian President Joko Widodo during a rally on Election Day on Jul. 9, 2014, at Proklamasi Monument Park in Jakarta. Human rights groups have condemned the country’s seventh president for his “backwards” stance on capital punishment. Credit: Sandra Siagian/IPS

By Sandra Siagian
JAKARTA, Mar 26 2015 (IPS)

When Indonesia’s law and human rights minister visited one of the country’s prisons in December last year, he met a Nigerian convict on death row for drug trafficking, who performed songs for him before leaving him with a parting gift.

“He sang […] beautifully,” Yasonna Laoly, the human rights minister, tells IPS. “He first quoted from the Bible before he gave me a souvenir when I left – it was a painting, a beautiful one.”

“There are no statistics of a deterrent effect with the death penalty. Jokowi is using the death penalty […] to prove to his critics that he is firm." -- Haris Azhar, coordinator of the Commission for Missing Persons and Victims of Violence (Kontras)
A month ago, at one of the weekly Christian services held at his ministry in the capital, Jakarta, a pastor came up to the minister to plea for some prisoners facing the death penalty.

She brought up the Nigerian man Laoly had met last year, stressing that he had reformed, converted to Christianity and become a good person.

“She asked me, ‘Why can’t you help?’,” explains the minister, who has also received an album of songs from the Nigerian death row inmate.

“I told her that, psychologically, it bothers me, but I have to face the case,” Laoly tells IPS, adding that he “does not believe in capital punishment”.

“I spoke to the Attorney General [H.M. Prasetyo], who was with me when I visited him and he just replied: ‘This is the law of the country and we have a policy’.”

The government of this archipelago nation of 250 million people has a no-tolerance policy when it comes to drug trafficking and smuggling, and has no qualms about using the death penalty for such offenses.

Just after midnight on Jan. 18, six drug convicts were executed by firing squad, the first imposition of capital punishment since President Joko ‘Jokowi’ Widodo took office last October.

Another 10 drug convicts – citizens of Australia, France, Brazil, the Philippines, Ghana, Nigeria and Indonesia – are slated to be executed next, following their transfer to the island prison of Nusakambangan.

Prior to Widodo’s presidential election victory last year, capital punishment in the archipelago had declined. Four people were executed in 2013 after a five-year hiatus and no capital sentences were carried out by the state in 2014.

Still, there are currently 138 people – one-third of them foreigners – on death row, primarily for drug-related offenses. The government claims its hard-line stance has to do with the growing drug menace in Indonesia – at present, 45 percent of drugs in Southeast Asia flow through this country, making it the largest drug market in the region.

Citing statistics from the country’s National Narcotics Board (BNN), Troels Vester, country manager of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) put the number of drug users at 5.6 million this year.

Government statistics further indicate that drug abuse kills off some 40 Indonesians every day, a figure hotly disputed by local rights groups.

A street food vendor walks past a sign, warning residents against taking drugs, outside of the Russian consulate in South Jakarta. Indonesia imposes harsh penalties, including capital punishment, for drug-related crimes. Credit: Sandra Siagian/IPS

Officials say that rampant drug use also fuels a demand for medical and health services, putting undue pressure on the government to expend public resources on treatment and counseling, HIV testing, and anti-retroviral therapy for those people living with HIV/AIDS.

But the United Nations says that the use of the death penalty will not necessary reduce Indonesia’s drug woes, and has urged the country to stopper the practice of capital punishment in line with international law.

Earlier this month some 40 human rights groups from around the world dispatched a letter to the Indonesian president, reminding him, “Executions are against Article 28(a) of the Indonesian Constitution, which guarantees everyone’s right to life.”

The letter further stated, “They are also in breach of Indonesia’s international legal obligations under Article 6 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which recognises every human being’s inherent right to life.”

Such efforts have so far failed to sway the president, or stay the country’s harsh hand of justice.

Ignoring international pressure

Widodo has also rejected political bids for clemency, including entreaties from foreign governments to spare the lives of their citizens; five of the six drug convicts executed in January were foreigners.

In January, King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands personally requested Widodo to pardon Dutch national Ang Kiem Soe – convicted of being involved in a scheme to produce 15,000 ecstasy pills a day – but Widodo was unmoved.

Brazil and the Netherlands recalled their ambassadors from Jakarta after their nationals were executed in January, while Australia has been campaigning furiously to save two of its own citizens, with the country’s foreign minister, Julie Bishop, attempting an eleventh-hour prisoner swap, which was rejected.

Widodo has met all such efforts with a simple answer: there will be “no compromise” on the issue.

Human rights advocates like Amnesty International have slammed the Indonesian president’s “backwards” stance on capital punishment, accusing him of manipulating data to support his decisions.

“He says that 40 to 50 people are dying every day from drugs, but where is that figure coming from?” asks Haris Azhar, coordinator of the Commission for Missing Persons and Victims of Violence (Kontras), adding that the president’s actions came as a surprise as he never shared his views on capital punishment during his campaign.

“The hospitals, doctors and the health ministry aren’t giving us data. These figures are from the anti-drugs body BNN, but they have never been proven,” Azhar adds.

Other activists like Hendardi, head of the Setara Institute, believe the president is using the death penalty to protect his image and regain public support following criticism over his government’s weak performance in law enforcement.

“There are no statistics of a deterrent effect with the death penalty,” the human rights defender tells IPS. “Jokowi [a popular nickname for the president] is using the death penalty […] to prove to his critics that he is firm. I think he is trying to gain back popularity as the death penalty is still favoured among Indonesians.”

While there has been no comprehensive nationwide poll to assess public opinion on, or popular support for, capital punishment, surveys conducted by the media suggest that some 75 percent of the population is in favour of death sentences, primarily for terrorism, corruption and narcotics charges.

Death sentences are typically carried out by a firing squad comprised of 12 people, who shoot from a range of five to 10 metres. Prisoners are given the choice of standing or sitting, as well as whether to have their eyes covered by a blindfold, or their face concealed by a hood.

Inmates are generally informed of their fate just 72 hours prior to execution, a practice that has been blasted by human rights groups.

While the human rights minister admits that the death penalty may not solve all the country’s drug problems, he believes that a firm policy is the first step to preventing millions from falling “into ruin” at the hands of narcotics.

UNODC estimates that there are 110,000 heroin addicts and 1.2 million users of crystalline methamphetamine in Indonesia. But experts like Azhar feel the problem cannot be ‘executed away’. Instead, the Kontras coordinator suggests the country adopt a humane approach to law enforcement.

According to Amnesty International, some “140 countries have now abolished the death penalty. Indonesia has the opportunity to become the 141st country.” However, if the president’s resolve remains unchanged, this is unlikely to happen in the near future.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Less than eight per cent of drug users worldwide have access to a clean syringe programme. Credit: Fahim Siddiqi/IPS

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Feb 26 2015 (IPS)

As the call for the decriminalisation of drugs steadily picks up steam worldwide, a new study by a British charity concludes there has been no significant reduction in the global use of illicit drugs since the creation of three key U.N. anti-drug conventions, the first of which came into force over half a century ago.

“Illicit drugs are now purer, cheaper, and more widely used than ever,” says the report, titled Casualties of War: How the War on Drugs is Harming the World’s Poorest, released Thursday by the London-based Health Poverty Action."This approach hasn’t reduced drug use or managed to control the illicit drug trade. Instead, it keeps drugs profitable and cartels powerful." -- Catherine Martin of Health Poverty Action

The study also cites an opinion poll that shows more than eight in 10 Britons believe the war on drugs cannot be won. And over half favour legalising or decriminalising at least some illicit drugs.

The international treaties to curb drug trafficking include the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, the 1971 Convention on Psychotropic Substances and the 1988 United Nations Convention Against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances.

But over the last few decades, several countries have either decriminalised drugs, either fully or partially, or adopted liberal drug laws, including the use of marijuana for medical reasons.

These countries include the Netherlands, Portugal, Czech Republic, Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Guatemala, Ecuador, Honduras and Mexico, among others.

According to the report, the governments of Mexico, Colombia and Guatemala seek open, evidence-based discussion on U.N. drugs policy reform.

And “both the World Health Organisation (WHO) and UNAIDS not only share this view, but have called for the decriminalisation of drugs use.”

Asked if the United Nations was doing enough in the battle against drugs, Catherine Martin, policy officer at Health Poverty Action, told IPS, “The problem is that the U.N. is doing too much of the wrong things, and not enough of the right things.”

She pointed out that an estimated 100 billion dollars worldwide is poured into drug law enforcement every year, driven by U.N. conventions on drug control.

“However, this approach hasn’t reduced drug use or managed to control the illicit drug trade. Instead, it keeps drugs profitable and cartels powerful (fuelling corruption); spurs violent conflict and human rights violations; and disproportionately punishes small-scale drug producers and people who use drugs,” she added.

The report says UK development organisations have largely remained silent, while calls for drugs reform come from Southern counterparts, British tycoon Sir Richard Branson, current and former presidents, Nobel prizewinning economists and ex-U.N. secretary-general Kofi Annan.

The charity urges the UK development sector to demand pro-poor moves as nations prepare for the U.N. general assembly’s special session on drugs next year.

Many non-governmental organisations (NGOs), including British groups, have no lead contact or set process for participating in the session, says the report.

The report claims many small-scale farmers grow and trade drugs in developing countries as their only income source.

And punitive drug policies penalise farmers who do not have access to the land, sufficient resources and infrastructure that they would need to make a sustainable living from other crops.

Alternative crops or development programmes often fail farmers, because they are led by security concerns and ignore poor communities’ needs, the report notes.

The charity argues the militarisation of the war on drugs has triggered and been used to justify murder, mass imprisonment and systematic human rights violations.

The report stresses that criminalising drugs does not reduce use, but spreads disease, deters people from seeking medical treatment and leads to policies that exclude millions of people from vital pain relief.

Less than eight per cent of drug users have access to a clean needle programme, or opioid substitution therapy, and under four per cent of those living with HIV have access to HIV treatment.

In West Africa, people with conditions linked to cancer and AIDS face severe restrictions in access to pain relief drugs, amid feared diversion to illicit markets, according to the study.

Low and middle-income countries have 90 per cent of AIDS patients around the globe and half of the world’s people with cancer, but use only six per cent of morphine given for pain management.

Health Poverty Action states the war on drugs criminalises the poor, and women are worst hit, through disproportionate imprisonment and the loss of livelihoods.

Drug crop eradication devastates the environment and forces producers underground, often to areas with fragile ecosystems.

Asked what the U.N.’s focus should be, Martin told IPS the world body should focus on evidence-based, pro-poor policies that treat illicit drugs as a health issue, not a security matter.

These policies must protect human rights and end the harm that current policies do to the poor and marginalised, she said.

“Drug policy reform should support and fund harm reduction measures, and ensure access to essential medicines for the five billion people worldwide who live in countries where overly strict drug laws limit access to crucial pain medications,” Martin said.

Meanwhile, the report says that drug policy, like climate change or gender, is a cross-cutting issue that affects most aspects of development work: poverty, human rights, health, democracy, the environment.

And current drug policies undermine economic growth and make development work less effective, the report adds.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The writer can be contacted at thalifdeen@aol.com

Daniela Alfaro standing in front of the University of El Salvador med school, where the complaints she has filed about the harassment and aggression she has suffered as a transgender student of health education have gone nowhere. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
SAN SALVADOR, Feb 18 2015 (IPS)

Despite the aggression and abuse she has suffered at the University of El Salvador because she is a trans woman, Daniela Alfaro is determined to graduate with a degree in health education.

“There is very little tolerance of us at the university. I thought it would be different from high school, but it isn’t,” Alfaro, a third year student of health education at the University of El Salvador med school, in the capital, told IPS.

Rejected by the rest of her family, Alfaro only has the emotional and financial support of her mother, “the only one who didn’t turn her back on me,” she said.

Like her, many members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) community suffer harassment, mistreatment and even attacks on a daily basis in Central America because of their sexual orientation or gender identity, said activists from El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua interviewed by IPS.

The discrimination, aggression and harassment that Alfaro has experienced at the university have come from her own classmates, as well as professors and university staff and authorities.“We don’t exist for the state in the areas of health, education, work or social matters, there is no protocol for how public employees should treat us.” -- Carlos Valdés

Since 2010 she has been filing reports and complaints with the university authorities for the aggression she has suffered in the men’s bathroom, which she is forced to use. “But they don’t take my complaints seriously because I’m trans,” said the 27-year-old student.

Alfaro has also experienced the invisibility of LGBTI persons when they receive no response from institutions or officials because their complaints or reports are dismissed or ignored simply because of prejudice against non-heterosexuals, said Carlos Valdés, with the Lambda Organisation in Guatemala.

“We don’t exist for the state in the areas of health, education, work or social matters, there is no protocol for how public employees should treat us,” Valdés told IPS by phone from Guatemala City.

Lambda and three other organisations in Central America are carrying out the regional programme “Centroamérica Diferente” (Different Central America), aimed at securing respect for the human rights of people with different sexual orientations or gender identities.

“Basically we want to improve the quality of life of the LGBTI community, so we are no longer discriminated against by sectors and institutions of the government,” said Eduardo Vásquez, with the Salvadoran Asociación Entreamigos, which is involved in the initiative.

The programme began in May 2014 and will run through June 2016 in the four participating countries: El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua.

With funds from the European Union, it aims to get 40 organisations and more than 200 human rights activists involved, and to reach 3,550 members of the LGBTI community, 160 communicators, 600 public employees, 8,000 adolescents and 10 percent of the population of the four countries.

The programme provides legal support in cases of abuse and violence, and training for sexual diversity rights activists, and it carries out national and regional campaigns against homophobia.

The activists coordinate the activities with government institutions that provide public services to the LGBTI community, and exercise oversight to prevent abuses and discrimination, for example in health centres, schools and the workplace, or in police procedures.

“We are sad to see that some police continue to use poor procedures during searches, or refer in a disrespectful manner to gay or transgender persons,” Norman Gutiérrez, with the Centre for AIDS Education and Prevention in Nicaragua, another group taking part in the initiative, told IPS by telephone.

The programme will also set up a regional LGBTI human rights observatory to monitor cases of abuse, attacks and violence, and will conduct a study to gauge the magnitude of human rights violations based on sexual orientation or identity.

Hate crimes

The observatory and the study will play a key role in detecting, for example, how severe is the phenomenon of homophobic murders, especially against transgender persons, since official statistics do not recognise hate crimes and merely classify them as homicides, the activists explained.

“In Guatemala the right to life is one of the rights that is most violated, and these murders often target trans persons,” Valdés said.

Given the lack of clear official figures, the organisations compile information as best they can, without the necessary systematisation. Based on this information, the groups participating in the programme estimate that in the last five years, at least 300 members of the LGBTI community, mainly transgender women, were murdered in hate crimes.

These murders occur in a context of generalised violence in the region. The so-called Northern Triangle, made up of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, is one of the most violent regions in the world.

The murder rate in Honduras in the last few years has stood at around 70 per 100,000 population, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) – far above the Latin American average of 29 and the global average of 6.2.

In Honduras, LGBTI activists have reported at least 190 homophobic murders in the last five years, some of which were included in a report published Dec. 17 by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR).

The document reports human rights violations against the LGBTI community committed between January 2013 and March 2014 in 25 Organisation of American States member countries. In that period, at least 594 people perceived to be LGBTI were killed, while another 176 were victims of serious physical assaults.

The IACHR “urges States to adopt urgent and effective measures to prevent and respond to these human rights violations and to ensure that LGBTI persons can effectively enjoy their right to a life free from violence and discrimination.”

Among the cases compiled by the IACHR is the murder of a trans woman in Honduras who was stoned to death on Mar. 4, 2013 in the northern city of San Pedro Sula. She was identified as José Natanael Ramos, age 35.

Unlike other programmes that are implemented only in the capital cities, Centroamérica Diferente plans to reach small cities and towns as well, where the violence, discrimination and vulnerability are generally worse.

“In small towns there is much more ‘machismo’, more violence and more homophobia. Some hate crimes and murders aren’t even reported,” added Gutiérrez, the Nicaraguan activist.

There is also a high level of discrimination in the workplace against the LGBTI community in Central America, said Valdés, with the Lambda Organisation from Guatemala.

“For example, gays have to hide their identity in order to get a job, and if their sexual orientation is discovered, they are harassed until they quit,” he said.

Alfaro, meanwhile, said in front of the med school where she studies that she will not stop denouncing the discrimination and harassment she suffers, until she finally sees justice done.

“I just hope that someday they will respect my identity as a woman,” she said.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Customary landowners in the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea, both rainforest nations in the Southwest Pacific Islands, are suffering the environmental and social impacts of illegal logging. Credit: Catherine Wilson/IPS

By Catherine Wilson
SYDNEY, Dec 1 2014 (IPS)

Rampant unsustainable logging in the southwest Pacific Island states of Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands, where the majority of land is covered in tropical rainforest, is worsening hardship, human insecurity and conflict in rural communities.

Paul Pavol, a customary landowner in Pomio District, East New Britain, an island province off the northeast coast of the Papua New Guinean mainland, told IPS that logging in the area had led to “permanent environmental damage of the soil and forests, which our communities depend on for their water, building materials, natural medicines and food.”

Four years ago, a Malaysian logging multinational obtained two Special Agricultural Business Leases (SABLs) in the district, but local landowners claim their consent was never given and, following legal action, the National Court issued an order in November for the developer to cease logging operations.

“Within ten years nearly all accessible forests will be logged out and at the root of this problem is endemic and systematic corruption." -- Spokesperson, Act Now PNG
According to Global Witness, the company had cleared 7,000 hectares of forest and exported more than 50 million dollars worth of logs.

“We never gave our free, prior and informed consent to the Special Agricultural Business Leases (SABLs) that now cover our customary land … and we certainly did not give agreement to our land being given away for 99 years to a logging company,” Pavol stated.

One-third of log exports from PNG originated from land subject to SABLs in 2012, according to the PNG Institute of National Affairs, despite the stated purpose of these leases being to facilitate agricultural projects of benefit to local communities.

Pavol also cited human rights abuses with “the use of police riot squads to protect the logging company and intimidate and terrorize our communities.”

Last year an independent fact-finding mission to Pomio led by the non-governmental organisation, Eco-Forestry Forum, in association with police and government stakeholders, verified that police personnel, who had been hired by logging companies to suppress local opposition to their activities, had conducted violent raids and serious assaults on villagers.

Papua New Guinea, situated on the island of New Guinea, home to the world’s third largest tropical rainforest, has a forest cover of an estimated 29 million hectares, but is also the second largest exporter of tropical timber.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) predicts that 83 percent of the country’s commercially viable forests will be lost or degraded by 2021 due to commercial logging, mining and land clearance for oil palm plantations.

Papua New Guinea recently pledged to bring forward plans to end deforestation by a decade at the Asia-Pacific Rainforest Summit held in Sydney, Australia, but indigenous activists remain unconvinced.

“Within ten years nearly all accessible forests will be logged out and at the root of this problem is endemic and systematic corruption,” a spokesperson for the non-governmental organisation, Act Now PNG, said.

“We do not have tough penalties for law breakers and our laws are not enforced,” Pavol added, a view supported by London’s Chatham House.

Environmental devastation and logging-related violence is increasing adversity in Pomio, one of the least developed districts in East New Britain, where there is a lack of health services, decent roads, water and sanitation. Life expectancy is 45-50 years and the infant mortality rate of 61 per 1,000 live births is significantly higher than the national rate of 47.

In the neighbouring Solomon Islands, where 2.2 million hectares of forest cover more than 80 percent of the country, the timber-harvesting rate has been nearly four times the sustainable rate of 250,000 cubic metres per year.

While timber has accounted for 60 percent of the country’s export earnings, this is unlikely to continue, given the forecast by the Solomon Islands Forest Management Project that accessible forests will be exhausted by next year.

High demand for raw materials by growing Asian economies is a major driver of legal and illegal logging in both countries, with the industry dominated by Malaysian companies, and China the main export destination.

Unscrupulous practices, including procuring logging permits with bribes and breaching agreed logging concession areas, are extensive. More than 80 percent of the wood-based trade from PNG and Solomon Islands derives from unlawful extraction with illegal log exports from both island states worth 800 million dollars in 2010, reports the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

Since 2003, international companies, most involved with logging, have gained access to 5.5 million hectares of forest in PNG, in addition to the 8.5 million hectares already subject to timber extraction, through fraudulent acquisition of SABLs, according to a Commission of Inquiry and study by the California-based Oakland Institute.

The UNODC highlights the collusion between transnational crime networks, logging companies, politicians and public officials.

“In Solomon Islands the links between politicians and foreign logging companies are complex and well-entrenched. We regularly hear stories of politicians using their power to protect loggers, influence police and give tax exemptions to foreign businesses. In return, loggers fund politicians,” a spokesperson for Transparency Solomon Islands said.

Many national forestry offices in developing countries lack the technical and human resources to adequately monitor logging operations and are ill-equipped to deal with organised crime networks that facilitate the extraction and movement of illicit timber. Associated money laundering is also an issue with the Australian Federal Police estimating that 170 million dollars of funds deriving from crime in PNG are laundered through banks and property investment in Australia every year.

But while an Illegal Logging Prohibition Act recently came into force in Australia, making it a criminal offence to import or process illegal timber, no such legislation exists in the main market of China.

Transparency Solomon Islands says that government accountability needs to be strengthened and rural communities educated about their rights, the law and affective action that can be taken at the local level.

Inequality and low human development among the rural poor is further entrenched by the failure of both countries to channel resource revenues into provision of infrastructure, basic services and equitable economic opportunities.

In Papua New Guinea, one of the most unequal nations with a Gini Index of 50.9, poverty increased from 37.5 percent in 1996 to 39.9 percent in 2009, according to the World Bank.

In the Solomon Islands, logging has been the government’s main source of revenue for nearly 20 years, with GDP growth reaching 10 percent in 2011.

But the Pacific Islands Forum reports that “strong resource-led growth is failing to trickle down to the disadvantaged”, with the country ranked 157th out of 187 countries for human development.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

A carpenter organises a load of mahogany, precious wood seized by the authorities in Cuba's Ciénaga de Zapata wetlands. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 28 2014 (IPS)

A coalition of international organisations, led by INTERPOL and backed by the United Nations, is pursuing a growing new brand of criminals – primarily accused of serious environmental crimes – who have mostly escaped the long arm of the law.

Described as a worldwide operation, it is the first of its kind targeting individuals wanted for a wide range of crimes, including logging, poaching and trafficking in animals declared endangered species.

Widespread poaching, particularly in central Africa, has resulted in the loss of at least 60 percent of elephants in that region during the last decade.

Last week, INTERPOL, the world’s largest international police organisation, released photographs of nine fugitives charged with these crimes – and who are on the run.

The individuals targeted include, among others, Feisal Mohamed Ali, alleged to be the leader of an ivory smuggling ring in Kenya, according to the U.N. Daily News.

The international coalition is seeking help from the public for information that could help track down the nine suspects whose cases have been singled out for the initial phase of the investigations.

Rob Parry-Jones, manager of international policy at World Wildlife Fund (WWF), told IPS, “It sends a strong message that environmental crime is not merely an animal being illegally shot here or a tree illegally felled there. Environmental crime is highly organised crime and can have devastating impacts.”

He said INTERPOL’s response is something that WWF has wanted for some time. “It is also something that enforcement agencies have wanted for some time.”

The political platform and enabling environment for INTERPOL and other institutions to undertake the necessary research, and to be in a position to release such findings, is a welcome advance from a few years back when WWF and TRAFFIC first started their campaign to raise the political profile of wildlife crime, Parry-Jones said.

TRAFFIC (Trade Records Analysis of Flora and Fauna in Commerce) is a wildlife trade monitoring network supported by WWF.

Code-named INFRA-Terra (International Fugitive Round Up and Arrest), the global operation is supported by the International Consortium on Combating Wildlife Crime (ICCWC) – which is a collaborative effort of the Secretariat of the 1975 Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), along with INTERPOL, the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), the World Bank and the World Customs Organisation.

In a press statement last week, Ben Janse van Rensburg, chief of enforcement support for CITES, said, “This first operation represents a big step forward against wildlife criminal networks.”

He said countries are increasingly treating wildlife crime as a serious offence, and “we will leave no stone unturned to locate and arrest these criminals to ensure they are brought to justice.”

Nathalie Frey, deputy political director at Greenpeace International, told IPS her organisation strongly supports the INTERPOL initiative to strengthen law enforcement against environmental crimes.

“Whilst INTERPOL has been looking more closely into environmental crimes for a number of years, this is the first time we have seen them reach out to the public appealing for further information and leads,” she said.

By giving environmental criminals a name and a face, she said, “it shows that law enforcement agencies are finally starting to take crimes such as illegal logging and fishing as seriously as murder or theft.”

WWF’s Parry-Jones told IPS that addressing environmental crimes effectively across international borders requires legal frameworks that can talk with each other.

Dual criminality where crimes of this scale are recognised in countries’ legal frameworks as serious crimes — a penalty of four-plus year’s imprisonment — brings the crimes within the scope of the U.N. Convention against Transnational Organised Crime (UNTOC), enabling international law enforcement cooperation and mutual legal assistance, he said.

The nature of the crimes illustrates the links with other forms of transnational crime, including people trafficking and arms smuggling, and reinforces the argument over the past few years, both by WWF and TRAFFIC, that environmental crime is a cross-sectoral issue and a serious crime, he added.

Greenpeace’s Frey told IPS environmental crime is “big business”, and at an estimated 70-213 billion dollars per year, the earnings are almost on a par with other criminal activities such as drugs and arms trafficking. That estimate includes logging, poaching and trafficking of a wide range of animals, illegal fisheries, illegal mining and dumping of toxic waste.

Behind these perpetrators, she pointed out, are large networks of criminal activities, with corruption often permeating the whole supply chain of valuable commodities such as timber or fish.

Illegal logging, for example, is rife in many timber-producing countries, and is one of the main culprits for wiping out vast areas of forest that are often home to endangered species.

“Consumer markets are still awash with illegal wood despite regulations to ban the trade,” Frey said.

This, she said, is reflected in the staggering figures released by INTERPOL that illegal logging accounts for 50-90 percent of forestry in key tropical producer countries.

“Whilst we strongly welcome INTERPOL’s initiative to track down offenders and crack down on corruption it is very important that CITES [the U.N. convention to regulate international trade in endangered species] takes much greater action to encourage its parties to step up enforcement and controls,” Frey said.

She singled out the example of Afrormosia, a valuable tropical hardwood found in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

This species is under threat and has been listed as requiring special trade regulation under CITES, yet a blind eye continues to be turned to many cases of illegal trade.

Industrial loggers have a free pass to harvest Afrormosia in the country, despite illegal logging estimated to be almost 90 percent, she said.

CITES is supposed to verify legality, yet hundreds of CITES permits were unaccounted for. Traceability in the country is also non-existent, Frey added.

By allowing the continued trade of species that have been illegally harvested, CITES fails to protect species from extinction, and its lack of controls and weaknesses only serve to fuel environmental crimes, she declared.

According to the U.N. Daily News, wildlife crime has become a serious threat to the security, political stability, economy, natural resources and cultural heritage of many countries.

The extent of the response required to effectively address the threat is often beyond the sole remit of environmental or wildlife law enforcement agencies, or even of one country or region alone, it said.

Last June, the joint U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP)-INTERPOL Environmental Crime Crisis report, pointed to an increased awareness of, and response to, the growing global threat.

It called for concerted action aimed at strengthening action against the organised criminal networks profiting from the trade.

According to the report, one terrorist group operating in East Africa is estimated to make between 38 and 56 million dollars per year from the illegal trade in charcoal.

“Wildlife and forest crime also play a serious role in threat finance to organized crime and non-State armed groups, including terrorist organizations,” it said.

Ivory provides income to militia groups in the DRC and the Central African Republic. And it also provides funds to gangs operating in Sudan, Chad and Niger.

Last week, Uganda complained the loss of about 3,000 pounds of ivory from the vaults of its state-run wildlife protection agency.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The writer can be contacted at thalifdeen@aol.com

By Yury Fedotov
VIENNA, Oct 17 2014 (IPS)

Oct. 18 is the EU’s Anti-Trafficking Day, as well as the United Kingdom’s Anti-Slavery Day. These events offer a good opportunity to talk about human trafficking within Europe’s borders, but we should not forget that there are victims and survivors all over the world.

People like Grace, not her real name, who grew up in a large family in Western Nigeria. On leaving high school her uncle lured Grace to Lagos with false promises that her education would continue. But instead of libraries and lessons, this young Nigerian girl was forced to wear suggestive clothing and work long hours in her uncle’s beer parlour. She was pressured into sleeping with any customer willing to pay. Her aunt kept the money.

Courtesy of UNODC

Those who are trafficked, like Grace, are often destitute, alone and afraid. In the face of exploitation and constant abuse it is difficult to summon the courage to flee. Fortunately, she had access to a radio and overheard a show on human trafficking.

One of the interviewees, a staff member for the African Centre for Advocacy and Human Development, encouraged anyone needing help to contact the centre. Grace realised there might be a way out.

Grace approached the centre after running away from her aunt and uncle. She was given a medical examination, as well as a place to sleep and counselling. The centre later sponsored her training as a seamstress, and later, with support, she was able to open a shop to sell her clothes. Grace had successfully taken the long journey from victim to human trafficking survivor.

Although Grace’s cruel experiences are individual to her, they are sadly not unique. In its publication, Hear Their Story, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) highlights numerous stories of children and young people forced to sell themselves, and their labour.

UNODC’s human trafficking report found that 136 different nationalities detected in 118 countries between 2007 and 2010, making this a truly global crime.

Around 27 per cent of those trafficked are children forced into numerous sordid occupations, including petty crime, begging and the sex trade. 55-60 per cent of individuals trafficked globally are women. If the figure for women is added to those for young girls, it becomes 75 per cent.

The majority of these women are coerced into the sex trade; many others find themselves working as domestic servants or forced labour. There is also a commonly held myth that men are not trafficked. This is untrue. Men are also exploited for forced labour and can suffer extreme forms of abuse.

To counter this crime that shreds both dignity and human rights, there is a need to work constantly at the grassroots level. We have to be present where the traffickers are committing their gross crimes, and where victims can be helped to make the transition to a new life.

Countries also need to ratify and adopt the Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime and its protocol on human trafficking. The Convention creates a legal framework for mutual legal assistance and other means of tackling organised crime. But what is really needed is comprehensive data, meaning better reporting from countries, and proper funding.

In 2011, the UN Voluntary Trust Fund for human trafficking managed by UNODC, and which has a special emphasis on children, provided grants to 11 organisations working at the ground level. Thanks to their work, children and young adults, such as Grace, have been supported. But more funds are needed to provide legal support and advice, treatment for physical abuse, safe houses, additional life skills, as well as schooling and training.

Grace’s life changed when she heard a radio story that helped her become a survivor. On the EU’s Anti-Trafficking Day and the UK’s Anti-Slavery Day, we have to ensure that other victims find their voices, and when they escape or are freed, we are waiting to offer much needed protection.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

‘Copyists’ (transcribers) on duty in downtown Kabul. Some 66 percent of Afghans are illiterate, with figures reaching 82 percent among women. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

By Karlos Zurutuza
KABUL, Sep 26 2014 (IPS)

Seventy-year-old Mohamad Arif still earns a living in the streets of Kabul. He prepares all kind of documents for those who cannot read or write – in other words, the majority of people in this country of 30.5 million people.

“I was a Colonel of the Afghan Air Force but I can barely survive with my pension. I had no other choice but to keep working so I took this up 10 years ago,” Arif tells IPS during a short break between two clients.

"People usually want me to write a letter to a relative, often someone in prison. However, most show up because they need us to fill out official forms or applications of all sorts." -- Seventy-year-old Mohamad Arif, a transcriber in Kabul
Arif says he has two sons in college, and that he only leaves his post on Fridays – the Muslim holy day. He spends the rest of the week sitting in front of the provincial government building, in downtown Kabul. That’s where he has his umbrella and his working desk, also essential tools for the rest of the transcribers lining up opposite the concrete wall that protects the government compound.

“People usually want me to write a letter to a relative, often someone in prison. However, most show up because they need us to fill out official forms or applications of all sorts,” explains the most veteran pen-worker in this street, just after his last service, which earned him 50 afghanis (0.80 dollars) for a claim over a family inheritance not yet received.

In its National Literacy Action Plan, statistics provided by the Afghan Ministry of Education speak volumes: some 66 percent of Afghans are illiterate, with figures reaching 82 percent among women.

At 32, Karim Gul is also illiterate so he’s forced to come here whenever he needs to tackle an administrative process. The problem this time is that he sold a car but he has not yet been paid.

“My parents came to Kabul from Badakhshan [a north-eastern Afghan province] when I was a child but they prevented me from going to school. They said the other children would laugh at me,” recalls this young Tajik, who thinks he is “already too old” to learn how to read and write.

Customers like him need only wait a few minutes before they’re attended to. The copyists – fifteen in total here – are experts in their trade, but probably none more so than Gulam Haydar, a 65-year-old man who has worked for decades behind the high wall.

‘Copyists’ (transcribers) in Afghanistan can earn up to one dollar for each letter or document they prepare for their illiterate customers. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

“I was a civil servant until I retired eight years ago but I had to keep working to survive,” this Kabuli tells IPS. His age, he adds, does not allow him to conduct any physical work, so this alternative came as “holy salvation.”

“Prices for all of us range from 20 to 100 afghanis [0.30-1.7 dollars] depending on the request,” explains Haydar, adding that his monthly income varies accordingly. In any case, he says, the amount he receives helping his illiterate countrymen and women is “far better” than the average 203 dollars an Afghan civil servant gets monthly.

Sitting next to him, Shahab Shams nods.

“I just get enough to survive and to send my two children to school,” says this 42-year-old man, who has spent the last 13 years in his post.

“In Afghanistan there is no work for anybody. Besides, corruption is rife,” adds the copyist. “You constantly need to pay under the table for everything: to get your passport or any other official certificate; to enrol your children in school; in hospitals, in every single government building,” laments this man with a degree in engineering from the University of Kabul. It was never of any use to him.

Starting from scratch

According to a joint survey conducted by the Afghan High Office of Oversight and Anti-Corruption (HOOAC) and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), half of all Afghan citizens paid a bribe in 2012 while requesting a public service.

The 2012 study said most Afghans considered corruption, together with insecurity and unemployment, to be “one of the principal challenges facing their country, ahead even of poverty, external influence and the performance of the Government.”

Interestingly enough, such surveys also reveal that corruption is increasingly being considered an admissible part of day-to-day life. About 68 percent of citizens interviewed in 2012 said it was acceptable for a civil servant to top up a low salary by accepting small bribes from service users (as opposed to 42 per cent in 2009).

Similarly, 67 percent of the Afghan citizenry considered it “sometimes acceptable” for a civil servant to be recruited on the basis of family ties and friendship networks (up from 42 percent in 2009).

Leyla Mohamad had no chance whatsoever of ever becoming a civil servant. While it is no longer strange to come across female workers in the administration, illiteracy still poses an insurmountable hurdle. From under her burka, Mohamad explains she wants to denounce an assault she suffered in broad daylight, while she was accompanied by her three children, the oldest being just 10 years old.

“Every day we hear several cases like this one,” Abdurrahman Sherzai tells IPS after filling Mohamad’s form. “Too much time was lost in the failed election process and the economy has stalled because many companies and businesses depended on government subsidies. Eventually, sheer desperation leads to attacks against the most vulnerable [members] of society,” notes Sherzai, moments after being paid for the service.

After a presidential election that took place on Apr. 5, followed by a second runoff on Jun. 14, a fraud allegation forced a full ballot recount.

However, contenders agreed to share power on Sept. 21 so Ashraf Ghani was announced as the new Afghan president with his challenger, Abdullah Abdullah, joining him in a unity government. Despite the two runoffs and the painful audit process, no results of any kind will finally be published.

It was the Afghan Education Minister himself, Ghulam Farooq Wardak, who assured IPS that “none of this would have happened” were Afghanistan a fully literate country.

“But also bear in mind that we literally started from scratch, with a 95-percent illiteracy rate only 12 years ago,” the senior official underlined from his ministerial office.

But current statistics, he claims, lead to optimism. “We’ve gone from just a million children in school 12 years ago to nearly 13 million today; from 20,000 teachers to over 200,000,” asserted Wardak, adding that 2015 “will be the year for full school [enrolment], and full literacy in Afghanistan will be a reality in 2020.”

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

In Bolivia, licensed growers can legally cultivate a limited quantity of coca—a policy that has actually reduced overall production. But because it doesn’t fit the U.S. drug war model, the policy has raised hackles in Washington. Credit: Thomas Grisaffi/FPIF

By Zoe Pearson and Thomas Grisaffi
WASHINGTON, Sep 26 2014 (IPS)

Once again, Washington claims Bolivia has not met its obligations under international narcotics agreements. For the seventh year in a row, the U.S. president has notified Congress that the Andean country “failed demonstrably” in its counter-narcotics efforts over the last 12 months. Blacklisting Bolivia means the withholding of U.S. aid from one of South America’s poorest countries.

The story has hardly made the news in the United States, and that is worrisome. While many countries in the hemisphere call for drug policy reform and are willing to entertain new strategies in that vein, it remains business-as-usual in the United States.

In the present geopolitical context, when even U.S. drug war allies Colombia and Mexico are calling for new approaches to controlling narcotics, the U.S. rejection of the Bolivian model further undermines Washington’s waning legitimacy in the hemisphere.
The U.N.’s Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), meanwhile, seems to think that Bolivia is doing a great job, lauding the government’s efforts to tackle coca production (coca is used to make cocaine) and cocaine processing for the past three years.

The Organisation of American States (OAS) is also heaping praise on Bolivia, calling Bolivia’s innovative new approach to coca control an example of a “best practice” in drug policy.

According to the UNODC, Bolivia has decreased the amount of land dedicated to coca plants by about 26 percent from 2010-2013. Approximately 56,800 acres are currently under production

U.S. opposition

Bolivia has achieved demonstrable successes without—and perhaps because of—a complete lack of support from the United States: the Drug Enforcement Administration left in 2009 and all U.S. aid for drug control efforts ended in 2013.

Bearing in mind that U.S. drug policy in the Andes has always emphasised “supply-side” reduction like coca crop eradication, the decision is of course a political one. It reflects U.S. frustration that Bolivia isn’t bending to Washington’s will. Interestingly, most Bolivian-made cocaine ends up in Europe and Brazil—not the United States.

At the same time, Peru and Colombia, both U.S. favorites given their willingness to fall in line with U.S. drug policy mandates, were not included in the list of failures. To be sure, those countries have recently decreased coca crop acreage as well; in some years by a lot more than Bolivia has. Still, they had respectively about 66,200 and 61,700 acres more coca under cultivation than Bolivia in 2013, according to the UNODC’s June 2014 findings. Peru currently produces the most cocaine of any country in the world.

Bolivians have been consuming the coca plant for over 4,000 years as a tea, food, and medicine, and for religious and cultural practices. Coca, the cheapest input in the cocaine commodity chain, cannot be considered equivalent to cocaine, since over 20 chemicals are needed to convert the harmless leaf into the powdery party drug and its less glamorous cousin, crack.

Still, coca is listed as a Schedule 1 narcotic under the 1961 U.N. Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs (the defining piece of international drug control legislation).

When Evo Morales became president of Bolivia he worked to modify the Convention, and in 2013 eventually wrested from the U.N. the right to allow limited coca production and traditional consumption within Bolivia’s borders. In the process, all Latin American countries except Mexico (which supported the U.S.-led objection) supported Morales’ mission.

The Bolivian model

The basics of Bolivia’s approach to reining in coca cultivation are fairly simple. Licensed coca growers can legally cultivate a limited amount of coca (1,600 square metres) to ensure some basic income, and they police their neighbours to ensure that fellow growers stay within the legal limits. Government forces step in to eradicate coca only when a grower or coca grower’s union refuses to cooperate.

This grassroots control is possible because of the strength of agricultural unions in Bolivia’s coca growing regions and because of growers’ solidarity with President Morales, himself a coca grower.

Another incentive is that reducing supply drives up coca leaf prices, which means that producers can earn more money for their families. As one longtime grower and coca union leader from the Chapare growing region put it: “It’s less work and I make more money.” This income stability, combined with targeted aid from the Bolivian government, means that many coca growers are able to make a living wage and diversify their livelihood strategies—investing in shops, other legal crops, and education.

It also helps that the violence and intimidation at the hands of the previously U.S.-backed Bolivian military has come to an end. People remember what is was like, and many still suffer injuries sustained during different eradication campaigns. One coca grower, for example, had her jaw broken so badly by a soldier as she marched for the right to grow coca that she cannot be fitted for dentures to replace her missing teeth. She emphasized that life is so much better now because it’s less stressful. People do not want to see a return to forced eradication campaigns.

No one is pretending that Bolivia’s coca control approach means the end of cocaine production.  Some portion of coca leaf production—by some estimates, about 22,200-plus acres worth—is still ending up in clandestine, rudimentary labs where it is processed into cocaine paste.

Furthermore, because it is squeezed between Peru, a major cocaine exporter, and Brazil, a growing importer, Bolivia has found it increasingly difficult to control cocaine flows. As a result, despite increased narcotics seizures by Bolivian security forces under Morales’ government, drug trade activities within Bolivia’s borders by some accounts have actually increased over the last few years.

Nevertheless, and for better or worse, the country’s new method of coca control yields results and undeniably satisfies the U.S. supply-side approach, yet Washington maintains its hardline stance against the county. In the present geopolitical context, when even U.S. drug war allies Colombia and Mexico are calling for new approaches to controlling narcotics, the U.S. rejection of the Bolivian model further undermines Washington’s waning legitimacy in the hemisphere.

The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS-Inter Press Service. Read the original version of this story here.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Excerpt:

NGOs and government data suggests that a child goes missing every eight minutes in India. Credit: Sujoy Dhar/IPS

By K. S. Harikrishnan
THIRUVANANTHAPURAM, India , Sep 4 2014 (IPS)

In a country where well over half the population lives on less than two dollars a day, it takes a lot to shock people. The sight of desperate families traveling in search of money and food, whole communities defecating in the open, old women performing back-breaking labour, all this is simply part of life in India, home to 1.2 billion people.

But amidst this rampant destitution, some things still raise red flags, or summon collective cries of fury. Child trafficking is one such issue, and it is earning front-page headlines in states where thousands of children are believed to be victims of the illicit trade.

The arrest on Jun. 5 of Shakeel Ahamed, a 40-year-old migrant labourer, by police in the southern state of Kerala, created a national outcry, and reawakened fears of a complex and deep-rooted child trafficking network around the country.

Ahamed’s operation alone was thought to involve over 580 children being illegally moved into Muslim orphanages throughout the state.

“Many families are unable to afford the basic necessities of life, which forces parents to sell their children. Some children are abandoned by families who can’t take care of them. Some run away to escape abuse or unhappy homes. Gangsters and middlemen approach these vulnerable children." -- Justice J B Koshy, chairperson of the Kerala Human Rights Commission
Experts tell IPS that children are also routinely trafficked to and from states like Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Chhattisgarh and West Bengal.

According to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), child trafficking is rampant in underdeveloped villages, where “victims are lured or abducted from their homes and subsequently forced to work against their wish through various means in various establishments, indulge in prostitution or subjected to various types of indignitiesand even killed or incapacitated for the purposes of begging, and trade in human organs.”

Available records show a total of 3,554 crimes related to human trafficking in 2012, compared to 3,517 the previous year. Some 2,848 and 3,400 cases were reported in 2009 and 2010 respectively, as well as 3,029 cases in 2008.

In 2012, former State Home Affairs Minister Jitendra Singh told the upper house of parliament that almost 60,000 children were reported as “missing” in 2011. “Of those,” he added, “more than 22,000 are yet to be located.”

It is not clear how many of these “missing” children are victims of traffickers; a dearth of national data means that experts and advocates are often left guessing at the root causes of the problem.

NGOs and government agencies often cite contradictory figures, but both are agreed that a child goes missing roughly every eight minutes in the country.

Human rights watchdogs say there are many contributing factors to child trafficking in India, including economic deprivation. Indeed, the 2013 Global Hunger Index ranked India 63^rd out of 78 countries, adding that 21.3 percent of the population went hungry in 2013. According to the World Bank, 68.3 percent of Indians live on less than two dollars a day.

“Socio-economic backwardness is a key factor in child trafficking,” Justice J B Koshy, former chief justice of the Patna High Court and chairperson of the Kerala Human Rights Commission, told IPS, adding that a political-mafia nexus also fueled the practice in remote parts of the country.

“Many families are unable to afford the basic necessities of life, which forces parents to sell their children,” Koshy stated. “Some children are abandoned by families who can’t take care of them. Some run away to escape abuse or unhappy homes. The gangsters and middlemen approach these vulnerable children. In some cases, good-looking girls are taken away by force.”

An action research study conducted in 2005 by the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) found that a majority of trafficking victims belonged to socially deprived sections of society.

It is estimated that half of the children trafficked within India are between the ages of 11 and 14.

Some 32.3 percent of trafficked girls suffer from diseases such as HIV/AIDS, sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and other gynaecological problems, according to a 2006 report by ECPAT International.

This is likely due to the fact that most girls are trafficked for purposes of sexual exploitation.

A government-commissioned study conducted in 2003, the last time comprehensive data was gathered, estimated that the number of sex workers increased from two million in 1997 to three million in 2003-04, representing a 50-percent rise.

Many of these sex workers are thought to be girls between the ages of 12 and 15.

Sreelekha Nair, a researcher who was worked with the New Delhi-based Centre for Women’s Studies, added that parents coming from poor socio-economic conditions in remote villages sometimes readily hand over their children to middlemen.

Some parents have been found to “sell their children for amounts that are shockingly worthless,” she told IPS, in some cases for as little as 2,000 rupees (about 33 dollars), adding, “law and order agencies cannot often intervene in the private matters of a family.”

Rajnath Singh, home minister of India, told a group of New Delhi-based activists headed by Annie Raja, general secretary of the National Federation of Indian Women, that a central agency would conduct a probe into the mass trafficking of children from villages in the Gumla district of the eastern state of Jharkhand over the past several years.

The group had brought it to the attention of the minister that thousands of girls were going missing from interior villages in the district every year, while their parents claimed ignorance as to their whereabouts.

Raja told reporters in New Delhi this past Julythat developmental schemes launched by individual states and the central government often fail to reach remote villages, leaving the countryside open to agents attempting to “sneak teenage girls out of villages.”

Experts point out that implementation of the 1986 Immoral Traffic Prevention Act remains weak. Many believe that since the act only refers to trafficking for the purpose of prostitution, it does not provide comprehensive protection for children, nor does it provide a clear definition of the term ‘trafficking’.

Dr. P M Nair, project coordinator of the anti-human trafficking unit of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in New Delhi and former director general of police, said that investigations should focus on recruiters, traffickers and all those who are part of organised crime.

The ‘scene of crime’ in a trafficking case, he said, should not be confined to the place of exploitationbut should also cover places of transit and recruitment.

“Victims of trafficking should never be prosecuted or stigmatised,” he told IPS. “They should be extended all care and attention from the human rights perspective. There is a need for the mandatory involvement of government agencies in the post-rescue process so that appropriate rehabilitation measures are ensured” as quickly as possible, he added.

NGOs like Child Line India Foundation help provide access to legal, medical and counseling services to all trafficked victims in order to restore confidence and self-esteem, but the country lacks a coordinated national policy to deal with the issue at the root level.

Experts have recommended that the state provide education, or gender-sensitive market-driven vocational training to rescued victims, to help them reintegrate into society, but such schemes are yet to become a reality.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Credit: United Nations Information Service Vienna

By Martin Nesirky and Linda Petrick
VIENNA, Aug 8 2014 (IPS)

Austrians call it “UNO-City”. The United Nations calls it the Vienna International Centre (VIC). Both names give a hint of the scale and scope of the U.N’s headquarters in the Austrian capital, but not the full story.

As the VIC marks its 35th anniversary, it is worth reflecting on the U.N. family’s work here and its crucial role as one of the U.N.’s four global headquarters.Increasingly, sustainable development is a thread running through the work of all U.N. bodies, including those in Vienna.

The VIC’s three Y-shaped, interlinked buildings are certainly a product of their time. There is a retro 1970s feel to the orange-coloured lifts and to some of the corridors.

Yet the VIC has of course been modernised over the years to host a broad range of major events and more than 4,000 staff working at 14 bodies on topics ranging from nuclear safety to outer space affairs and from combatting drugs and crime to promoting sustainable industrial development and energy.

Six years ago Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, a former South Korean ambassador to Vienna, opened an additional state-of-the-art conference building that he said further underscored Austria’s commitment to multilateralism, a commitment that highlights the country’s neutrality and geopolitical location.

When it comes to news, many people link Vienna with the International Atomic Energy Agency. Yet while it has often made headlines because of Iran, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) or Fukushima, the Agency’s work covers much more – including supporting the peaceful uses of nuclear technology in health and agriculture.

Other parts of the U.N. family in Vienna make headlines in their own way.

The Preparatory Commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organisation promotes the treaty that bans all nuclear explosions and is establishing global verification to ensure no such blast goes undetected. Indeed, its monitoring picks up not just nuclear explosions such as those most recently conducted by the DPRK but also earthquakes like the one that caused a tsunami to hit Japan in 2011.

Atoms apart, the United Nations in Vienna is well known for its work tackling drugs and crime, including through a network of field offices and through its flagship World Drug Report. The U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) also plays a vital role in promoting security and justice for all.

Increasingly, sustainable development – a top priority for the Secretary-General and Member States – is a thread running through the work of all U.N. bodies, including those in Vienna. The United Nations Industrial Development Organisation, whose presence in Austria predates the VIC by more than a decade, is a good example, along with UNODC.

Far newer but weaving that same vital thread is the Sustainable Energy for All initiative. Its headquarters are just outside the VIC in an adjacent emerging office and residential district but it is a dynamically growing organisation that is very much a part of the U.N. constellation.

The U.N. Office for Outer Space Affairs is also heavily geared to playing its part in sustainable development as it promotes international cooperation in the exploration and peaceful uses of outer space.

Smaller offices include the U.N. Postal Administration, the Interim Secretariat of the Carpathian Convention (United Nations Environment Programme), the International Commission for the Protection of the Danube River, the Office for Disarmament Affairs Vienna Office, the U.N. Register of Damage Caused by the Construction of the Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, the U.N. Commission on International Trade Law, the U.N. Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation and the International Narcotics Control Board.

They may not always grab media attention but their targeted technical work has a concrete impact in their respective fields.

The United Nations Information Service Vienna helps to coordinate public information work by those U.N. bodies based in Austria, and is a good starting point for those wanting to know more. It also serves as an information centre for the public, media, civil society and academia in Austria, Hungary, Slovakia and Slovenia, and provides guided tours at the VIC.

In case anyone wonders, the international bodies based at the VIC split the running costs and pay Austria an annual rent of seven euro cents – it used to be one Austrian Schilling. Needless to say, Vienna is enriched by hosting the United Nations – and other international bodies such as the Organisation of Petroleum-Exporting Countries, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe and the European Union’s Fundamental Rights Agency.

Certainly for the United Nations family, Vienna offers a tremendous venue for technical work, mediation and decision-making that contribute to the global goals of peace and security, sustainable development and human rights. And it is all done in what the Director-General for the U.N. Office at Vienna, Yury Fedotov, likes to call the Vienna Spirit – a spirit of pulling together to decide and then take action.

Next Friday, Aug. 15, a joint-U.N.-Austrian celebration will take place to commemorate the 35th anniversary, which falls on Aug. 23.

Martin Nesirky is Acting Director, United Nations Information Service Vienna.

Edited by : Kitty Stapp

Drug transactions are usually conducted using the online peer-to-peer currency bitcoin, which remains in escrow until it is transferred to the seller after the product is delivered. Credit: BTC keychain/cc by 2.0

By Chau Ngo
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 3 2014 (IPS)

In its two years of operation, the online marketplace Silk Road raked in 1.2 billion dollars in revenue and amassed an estimated 200,000 registered users – a success story that would be any start-up’s dream.

But the site was shut down by the FBI last October amid charges that it was essentially the Amazon.com of illegal drugs, shedding light on the increasing sophistication of a cyber drug trade that offers both buyers and dealers high-tech anonymity.“The new markets that have replaced Silk Road can now encrypt all communications and use advanced techniques to launder the bitcoins used in transactions." -- Prof. David Hetu

In its World Drug Report 2014 released last week, the United Nations Office on Drug and Crime (UNODC) warns that illicit online drug sales will pose unique challenges for law enforcement.

“The online marketplace for illicit drugs is becoming larger and more brazen,” it said. “If the past trend continues, it has the potential to become a popular mode of trafficking in controlled substances in years to come.”

The growth of online drug dealing has gone hand in hand with advancements in technology. The UNODC’s review of global drug seizure data shows that cannabis seizures obtained through the postal service rose 300 percent in the decade from 2000 to 2011.

The majority of the reported seizures came from Europe and the Americas, with high-quality drugs and new psychoactive substances, according to the report.

Governments’ efforts to curb this crime brought down a number of networks last year, with Silk Road being the most prominent case so far. The United States’ Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) arrested the website’s owner, Ross Ulbricht, a 29-year-old physics graduate, and seized bitcoins worth 33.6 million dollars at the time of the capture.

Silk Road was for some time the most sophisticated and extensive marketplace on the Internet, where dealers sell illegal goods and services, including illicit drugs of almost every variety, the FBI said.

So far the value of cyberspace drug trafficking is still marginal in comparison with the overall drug trade, which is in the hundreds of billions of dollars, according to David Hetu, assistant professor of criminology at the University of Montreal, who specialises in cybercrime. But the upward trend is troubling.

“We are seeing an exponential growth of virtual drug markets,” he told IPS. “What we have seen is a lot of markets with a heavy focus on drugs and prescription drugs.”  

There are some 200,000 drug-related deaths worldwide every year, and 39 million people had drug disorders or dependence in 2012, according to the U.N. Despite a stabilisation of drug use around the world, illicit opium production still rose to a record level last year, with Afghanistan continuing to be the world’s largest producer.

Taking advantage of high tech

Online drug trading has existed since the early days of the Internet. However, its sophistication has only accelerated recently, experts say. Technology has enabled online dealers to offer goods and services, and make transactions anonymously.

“Two distinct technologies that have emerged in the past decade – anonymous networks such as Tor, and pseudonymous payments systems such as Bitcoin – have made it possible to create online anonymous markets which provide reasonably good anonymity guarantees,” Nicolas Christin, assistant research professor at Carnegie Mellon University, told IPS.

“This is the most important development in online drug dealing in the past three years.”

In his research paper “Traveling the ‘Silk Road’: a measurement analysis of a large anonymous online marketplace,” Christin noted that the top three items for sale on this website were “weed”, “drugs” and “prescriptions”.

Introduced in 2009 as a virtual currency, the bitcoin has no physical existence. Operating on an electronic system built on the peer-to-peer network where users are directly connected instead of going through the central servers in the traditional system, transactions in bitcoins are almost untraceable and anonymous.

Despite not being recognised by any central bank or government, the bitcoin is widely seen as not being illegal. People can buy anything from from pizzas to houses with bitcoins, as long as the sellers accept it.

Tor, or The Onion Router, is software that enables data to transmit globally almost untraceably. It allows users to connect to another location in the network while keeping their Internet Protocol address invisible – known as the Dark Net.

Because of the technical issues, buying drugs online is more complicated than in the streets, said David Hetu. However, it is not too difficult for those who seek to circumvent law enforcement. All that a buyer needs to do is to buy bitcoins online, install Tor, choose to buy drugs from the listings and have it delivered at home through the postal service.

For dealers, drug trafficking has become easier with technology. After Road Silk was taken down by the FBI last year, new markets emerged just within days.

“The new markets that have replaced Silk Road can now encrypt all communications and use advanced techniques to launder the bitcoins used in transactions,” Hetu said.

“This makes it much more difficult for law enforcement to trace buyers and vendors.”

International cooperation

There is no reliable data on how many people are buying drugs online, but the types of drugs being sold are multiplying, according to the UNODC.

Before its shutdown, Silk Road was the marketplace for a vast majority of illegal drugs, with nearly 13,000 listings of controlled drugs, the FBI said. Despite the anonymity of transactions, the FBI said dealers might be located in more than 10 countries, stretching from North America to Europe.

Cyberspace drug dealing is particularly challenging, as offenders can easily and quickly adapt their practices to avoid risks posed by law enforcement, Thomas Holt, an assistant professor at Michigan State University’s School of Criminal Justice, told IPS.

Holt, whose research focuses on cybercrime and identity theft, said that law enforcement agencies need to engage in undercover operations to understand the practices of buyers and sellers within the market.

“International cooperation is essential to these efforts as the buyers and sellers may be half a world away from one another,” he said.

“Incorporating postal inspectors, customs agents, and other agencies is vital to ensure that points in the supply chain could be more effectively cut off and make it more difficult for buyers to obtain products.”

Smartphones are a new phenomenon in trafficking; a couple of years ago the majority of crimes were being committed using desktops. Credit: Yuichi Shiraishi/cc by 2.0

By Lucy Westcott
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 28 2013 (IPS)

In the second half of June, law enforcement in Chişinău, Moldova’s capital city, received an email from a parent telling them their child had been kidnapped.

A mixed group of police and prosecutors, they had to trace the email back to the kidnapper, a skill that is becoming essential in an increasingly digital age.“Nearly every crime seems to have some kind of phone involved in it.” -- Adam Palmer of UNODC

Thankfully, it was only a training exercise. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) visited Moldova, the poorest country in Europe, at the request of authorities there, who were struggling and under-trained to deal with an increase in cybercrime and Internet-based human trafficking.

UNODC provided three days of training in basic forensic techniques, such as tracing a criminal across the Internet and finding images and other information on a locked computer.

“[It’s] old-fashioned detective work in a digital age,” Adam Palmer, a senior expert in cybercrime and emerging crimes at UNODC, told IPS.

While official figures on human trafficking are notoriously hard to come by due to the crime’s secretive nature, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) estimates that 21 million people are forced into labour around the world, including 4.5 million victims of forced sexual exploitation.

With the pressure of emerging technologies, anti-trafficking organisations as well as law enforcement need to adapt their knowledge of new techniques and devices used by criminals. Smartphones are a new phenomenon, Palmer said; a couple of years ago the majority of crimes were being committed on desktops.

“Nearly every crime seems to have some kind of phone involved in it,” Palmer said.

For authorities in Moldova, a Tier 2 ranked country in the U.S. State Department’s annual Trafficking in Persons Report, many of the training exercises were new. Before the ubiquity of electronic devices, vital information might have been written in a notebook, accessible by simply reading the pages, Palmer said.

Now, police are more likely to have to crack codes, with information saved on password-protected devices.

But the problem of Internet-based sex trafficking, which is the use of the Web for the recruitment, advertisement and sale of people, overwhelmingly women, is not confined to Moldova. It is also an issue in developed countries like the United States.

Amy Fleischauer, director of victim services at the International Institute of Buffalo, a group that helps immigrants and refugees settle in Western New York, has found survivors of sex and labour trafficking being recruited and advertised via the Internet. The institute spends time with survivors so that they know how easily they can be tracked through Facebook, GPS on their phones and their Internet history.

It’s important to realise the inherent interrelation between sex and labour trafficking, Fleischauer told IPS. She recalls a number of cases involving agricultural workers in the United States, where brothels were established on farms to “satisfy workers”.

“Sex trafficking almost always involves labour trafficking,” Fleischauer says. “Focusing on just sex trafficking does a disservice to victims.”

Increased awareness of trafficking through the Internet has caught the attention of companies that run the Web, and whose products are being used to facilitate the crime.

“The most effective way to investigate cybercrime is… to work with private sector companies,” Palmer said, adding that these companies are willing to help as traffickers are abusing their technology.

Jacquelline Fuller, director of giving at Google, told IPS the company has a “long-standing interest” in helping to combat child exploitation and trafficking over the Internet.

“More recently, we took a deep dive to see… how we could help,” Fuller said.

Google has provided several grants, including one for 11.5 million dollars, to help three anti-trafficking organisations, Polaris Project, La Strada International and Liberty Asia, partner together to more effectively combat the crime.

In April, Google gave three million dollars to help fund the Global Human Trafficking Hotline Network, and two Internet companies, Salesforce and Palantir Technologies, provided technology that allows the organisations to share data.

“[These groups can] use technology to get ahead of the bad guys,” Fuller said.

Bradley Myles has seen first-hand the changing face of sex trafficking. The CEO of Polaris Project, a U.S.-based non-profit that works directly with survivors of human trafficking, Myles told IPS that from 2005 to 2008, Craigslist was one of the worst channels for Internet-based sex trafficking.

After Craigslist removed many of the advertisements that led to women and girls being exploited, Myles now sees similar issues with the website Backpage.

“There’s a very clear, identifiable pattern there,” Myles says. “Sometimes it’s parents calling in after seeing their child’s ad on Backpage, their 16-year-old daughter being advertised as a 19-year-old.”

Backpage has been made aware that traffickers are using their site, but Myles wonders whether protective measures put in place are enough.

“It’s a fluid crime,” Myles told IPS. “We’re in a new world of having the technology partnerships to make everything we’re doing more robust.”

The true extent of Internet-based trafficking is still unknown, Fleischauer says, but increased awareness and getting police more educated on types of cases, recruitment and strategies could help.

“I think we have no idea what’s out there,” she says.

Over 120,000 Afghan women and 60,000 children admit to being addicted to drugs. Credit: Anand Gopal/IPS

By Giuliana Sgrena
KABUL, May 24 2013 (IPS)

Located on a narrow street in a quiet neighbourhood in Kabul, the Sanga Amaj Women’s Treatment Centre is the only one of its kind in Afghanistan: named after the 22-year-old journalist who was assassinated in 2007, the facility caters exclusively to Kabul’s massive population of female drug addicts.

Out of respect for its residents’ privacy, the centre does not disclose its location and strictly monitors all visits. Here, a kind and professional staff dressed in white aprons attend to 25 women and an equal number of children between the ages of five and 11who spend most of their time in a cosy playroom filled with toys.

The entire facility is split between two floors, housing dormitory-style rooms with 12 beds each and an array of common rooms.

The clean, pleasant settings belie the desperate circumstances of the building’s occupants.

Most of the women here say they started out using opium and hashish, but turned to harder drugs like heroin in order to cope with “economic hardships, family violence, or psychological problems,” Storai Darinoor, one of the young coordinators at the facility, told IPS.

“In many cases husbands introduce their wives to drugs, often forcibly. When either one of the parents are addicts, the children generally become addicts, too,” she added. Women and children tend to favour oral intake of drugs, either eating or smoking their fix, but one 11-year-old in the centre was found to have been using injections.

Though the female residents declined to speak with IPS, staff members said that patients have admitted to taking heroin as “medicine” to ease the stresses of daily life.

“Young children are fed opium by their mothers to keep them quiet, while older children, in addition to consuming drugs themselves, provide drugs for their mothers,” according to Storai.

She says 80 percent of female addicts turned to drugs upon returning to the country from Iran and Pakistan, where they lived as refugees during the Taliban’s reign from 1996 to 2001.

The Sanga Amaj Centre receives funding through the drug advisory programme of the Colombo Plan – a U.S.-backed regional initiative designed to coordinate strategies for reducing demand and supply of narcotics in Asia – but only enough to provide the most basic therapy.

“Treatment typically lasts 45 days,” Dr. Huma Mansouri, director of the facility, tells IPS, beginning with a 10-day period of detoxification.

“After that we proceed to administering daily doses of buprenorphine (a semi-synthetic opioid) since we do not have access to methadone.” When this is inadequate to stop severe withdrawal symptoms – crying, screaming or beating their heads against a wall – staff members resort to “water therapy”: short, cold showers that help patients to relax.

After the first 10 days, medication is limited to daily doses of vitamins. The rest of the time in the facility is spent on rehabilitation, attending awareness sessions on the harmful effects of drug use and classes on different subjects including health, psychology and religion, “because drug use is forbidden in Islam,” Mansouri said.

The women then move into a three-month vocational programme, learning sewing and computer skills, which open up employment opportunities once they leave the centre.

One of the facility’s 12 staff members is then assigned to “follow” the women for a two-year period, making weekly house visits, offering support or advice, and providing counselling free of charge.

Not all of the women have a place to go after being discharged. Some are abandoned by their families as a result of their addiction and have no way of supporting themselves. Whenever possible, the centre hires its old patients to work as cleaners in the facility.

To date, the centre has treated over 1,100 women, of which “only 145 have relapsed,” according to Storai.

But the vast majority of women in Afghanistan have no access to such treatment, and often live out their days in a cycle of violence and poverty made worse by their addiction.

According to a survey conducted by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in 2010, the last time such data were gathered, roughly one million Afghans between the ages of 15 and 64 were addicted to drugs, or three percent of the population of 35 million.

An estimated 120,000 of these addicts are women, and over 60,000 are children.

Experts attribute these dismal figures to numerous factors, including a 40-percent unemployment rate and an increase in poppy cultivation: in 2012, an estimated 154,000 hectares of farmland were dedicated exclusively to poppy.

The UNODC 2013 Afghanistan Opium Risk Assessment says cultivation in the main poppy growing areas – like the southern regions of Helmand and Kandahar, and northern provinces like Herat, Faizabad and Badakhshan – is expected to rise even further in the coming years.

The country, which used to supply about half of Europe’s heroin in 2001, now accounts for a full 90 percent of the global supply of opiates, making it the world’s largest producer by far. An estimated 26 percent of the country’s GDP comes directly from the narcotics trade, which the U.N. report says is “strongly” linked to economic insecurity and a lack of agricultural aid.

Though Afghanistan has a long history of opium use, with many families in the north taking moderate doses in order to work longer hours, addiction levels did not reach such heights until the U.S.-led invasion in 2001 forced warring mujahideen groups out of the cities and into rural areas, where they took over vast poppy fields and established “production centres and laboratories along the northern border,” Dr. Tariq Suliman, director of ‘Nejat’, one of the few drug rehabilitation centres in Kabul, told IPS.

Located in the impoverished Karte Char neighbourhood in western Kabul, Nejat sits in the middle of a huge concentration of drug users, who congregate in parks, crouch under bridges or trees, or even just sit in the middle of the road to get their fix.

While heroin is the most widely used drug – available at virtually every street corner for six dollars a gramme – hashish and opium are also readily available. For a population with an average income of just 500 dollars a year, this is a steep price to pay, and often pushes families deeper into poverty.

The government’s ministry of counter narcotics has no funds with which to implement prevention, treatment or rehabilitation programmes, leaving the onus for this work entirely on the shoulders of civil society, laments Suliman.

Experts say women bear the brunt of addiction, partly because religious and cultural taboos preventing women from consuming drugs mean that few actively seek treatment for fear of being stigmatised.

Female drug addicts here are a kind of “hidden population”, secreting themselves away in their homes, which, in turn, breeds a culture of violence against children and pushes the latter closer towards addiction.

Experts say that unless the government allocates more money for the creation of facilities like the Sanga Amaj Centre, the thousands of female addicts have no hope of a better future.

UNODC Executive Director Yury Fedotov on a visit to the Pavão-Pavãozinho favela in Rio de Janeiro. Credit: Fabíola Ortiz/IPS

By Fabíola Ortiz
RIO DE JANEIRO, May 10 2013 (IPS)

Tuchinha was once a drug lord in Rio de Janeiro’s Mangueira favela. But today he is helping youngsters in this Brazilian city turn their lives around and leave behind crime, prison and the likelihood of an early death.

Franciso Paulo Testas Monteiro, better known as Tuchinha, climbed to the heights of the criminal world. Because he could read and write – he went to school through the fifth grade – and was good with numbers, he was put in charge of the accounts of one of Rio de Janeiro’s main criminal bands.

He became an almost mythical figure in the world of organised crime as the drug baron of Morro da Mangueira, a violent shantytown where drug traffickers held sway. Half of his life – 25 years – was dedicated to the drug trade.

He had plenty of ready cash, women and other perks. But in his ascent, he paid a high price. He spent a total of 21 years in prison, serving two different sentences, and both he and his family lived with death threats.

Today, at 49, he says he is repentant. “I grew up in Mangueira, I was a leader,” he told IPS. “I had money, women, jewels, but I didn’t have freedom. When I ventured outside my neighbourhood, I had to hide, or else I had to actually leave Rio. If I had had an opportunity to do so, I would have changed my life earlier.”

It was Aug. 5, 2011 when he left drug trafficking behind forever, after he was invited by the local NGO AfroReggae to give workshops to help young people leave behind a life of crime.

“I did many bad things, and gave orders for many others to be committed,” he said. “I paid heavily for it, with my freedom. Today my role is to rescue those who want to leave crime behind, and I am the living proof that a life lived in peace is worth it.”

Tuchinha visits prisons to talk to young inmates, and he helps mediate in conflicts in violent neighbourhoods.

“We want to give the same opportunity I had to people who want to get back on track, abandon crime, and live in peace with their families. Many of them feel hopeless, but I tell them there is hope.”

The former drug boss is an advocate of amnesties for prisoners, so they can have a chance to begin a new life.

He is confident that he will be able to finish school, and hopes to live in a safer city, for the sake of his children.

Tuchinha works to convince young drug dealers and traffickers to join AfroReggae’s “employability” programme. Created in 2008, the programme has so far managed to find jobs for more than 3,100 people.

Daniela Pereira da Silva, 35, spent three years in prison and is now one of the programme coordinators.

“I form part of the statistics on women, which show that most women in prison are there because they had a boyfriend or husband who was a drug trafficker,” she told IPS.

The aim of the programme, she said, is to help ex-convicts enter the labour market. “Demand has been strong, and we’re also open to residents of communities where drug trafficking groups operate, and to relatives of ex-convicts, to boost family incomes and keep them from falling back into crime,” she said.

Tuchinha and Silva formed part of the group of former drug traffickers supported by AfroReggae who met with the executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Yury Fedotov, on his first official visit to Brazil, May 7-9.

The meeting, which was attended by IPS, took place in AfroReggae’s main offices in the Pavão-Pavãozinho favela or shantytown, situated behind the world-famous Ipanema beach.

Pavão-Pavãozinho is one of the favelas “pacified” by the authorities under Rio’s strategy of regaining state control over areas ruled by armed drug gangs, by means of a heavy, permanent police presence combined with increased spending in the areas of health, education, sports and income-generating activities.

Fedotov visited the city to learn first-hand about the social and public security programmes underway in Rio’s favelas. “I came to Brazil to see how successful experiences of combating crime in Rio de Janeiro could be adapted to other places with similar security issues,” he said.

He added that the favela pacification project was apparently working, and said it was the first time he had seen anything like it and he was “very impressed”

“Such initiatives are enormously instructive for UNODC as they can provide a roadmap on how to reintegrate ex-traffickers in an effective and creative way as part of overall crime prevention interventions,” he said.

The Russian diplomat said he could see the changes since he visited Rio 10 years ago. He also expressed his admiration for the people who had the courage to leave behind a life of crime.

Mangueira and Pavão-Pavãozinho are two of the 32 favelas in Rio de Janeiro pacified by the police. The authorities’ goal is to set up a total of 40 police pacification units (UPPs) in the city’s poor neighbourhoods by 2014.

At least one million of the six million people in Rio proper (Greater Rio has a population of 11 million) live in some 750 favelas, a number of which are still ruled by drug gangs.

“Our policy used to be focused on repression, which generated more conflicts and deaths,” the commander of the local UPP, Major Felipe Magalhães dos Reis, said at the meeting in Pavão-Pavãozinho. “The police didn’t tackle the causes of violence, but its effects. Meanwhile, criminals had increasingly powerful weapons.”

The cost of the “war on drugs” was high in terms of loss of life, he acknowledged.

The police say more than 2,000 police were killed between 1991 and 2008, another 10,000 people died in confrontations with the security forces, and 170,000 guns were seized.

“There was no solution in sight, until the idea of creating the UPPs emerged,” Magalhães dos Reis said.

“Social inclusion and community development are essential components in preventing crime,” Fedotov said, adding that the experience could be adapted to other countries, especially the elements of social integration, pacification and alternative means of life.

Brazil is a transport point for the international drug trade. In addition, internal consumption has spiralled and it is now a major market for drugs.

During his visit this week, Fedotov met with government officials to discuss future cooperation, in regional and global associations.

In Brasilia, he told reporters that Brazil was a global actor, and that UNODC was interested in its support and participation in global issues like the fight against transnational organised crime and illegal drugs.