From All Headline News:
German police arrested six people on Wednesday morning at Gelsenkirchen, Essen and Mulheim, in an alleged human smuggling ring that took Iraqi refugees to Sweden. Aside from the six arrested, another five were detained for investigation and one member of the ring is still being pursued.
The syndicate is allegedly responsible for bringing over 100 Iraqi asylum seekers to Sweden; another 63 were apprehended in Germany and Italy. The refugees were traveling aboard rented camper vans that picked up the Iraqis in Greece and traveled through Italy, Austria and Germany.
Sweden is a favorite destination of refugees because of its liberal asylum laws. Investigation into the syndicate began in September 2007 and involved about 200 police officers.
Germany, because of its central location, is a favored stopover or final destination for victims of various human trafficking schemes. On July 2006, joint Bulgarian and German police operations took down a syndicate that tried to smuggle 14 Bulgarian women into Hamburg to work as prostitutes.
From AFP:
Authorities in military-ruled Myanmar, listed by Washington as among the world's worst human trafficking offenders, arrested a couple trying to smuggle four women to China, state media said Thursday.
In a rare acknowledgement of the problem, the Myanmar-language Mirror paper said the two [traffickers] were held as they tried to bring four women to board a train in the commercial hub Yangon to the border town of Muse. From there they would have been smuggled into China to work as maids, the newspaper quoted police as saying, and identified the couple.
The government admits women from Myanmar have been lured to China with the promise of good jobs but were instead sold and forced to marry older men. Myanmar made human trafficking illegal in September 2005, but in an annual report last year the United States accused the government of complicity in the smuggling of people to Bangladesh, China, Malaysia and Thailand. Among the reasons were sexual exploitation, domestic service and forced labour.
Myanmar sentenced 33 human traffickers to life in prison in February last year, while in 2006, Chinese and Myanmar police arrested 64 people for human trafficking.
From the Philippine Inquirer:
The Philippines- Eastern Visayas continues to be a source of women and children being sent to Metro Manila brothels and sweatshops, and the number of trafficking cases is alarming, according to the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) in the region.
DSWD officials said the number of human trafficking cases was increasing despite efforts to stop them. “Eastern Visayas remains to be a sending region,” said Leticia Corillo, DSWD regional director. She said the victims were mostly children and women who were recruited by trafficking gangs. The victims end up working without pay in brothels and sweatshops in Metro Manila, she said.
Last year, the number of human trafficking cases reached 185, up from only 108 in 2005, Corillo said. From January to June, the DSWD monitored 108 cases of human trafficking. Over 70 percent of the cases involved women, while the rest involved male and female children aged 13 years to 17 years, she said.
Since the campaign against human trafficking started in 2004, the regional DSWD has filed eight cases against traffickers, Corillo said. The cases remain pending in various courts, she said.Read the full article
Lack of awareness of trafficking amongst politicians and law enforcement and lack of political will continue to hamper civil sector efforts to prosecute traffickers in court. Additionally, because of the huge profits generated, human trafficking is an industry that is protected not only by traffickers but also by corrupt politicians, police and other parties who receive bribes for their complicity.
From the Sify News:
The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has charged senior diplomat and former Special Secretary in External Affairs Ministry Rakesh Kumar for allegedly being involved in human trafficking.
The CBI filed the charge against Kumar, a 1972 batch Indian Foreign Service officer, and certain others including an official of Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR) for allegedly entering into a criminal conspiracy and sending people abroad on false pretexts, official sources said on Sunday.
In its chargesheet, the CBI alleged that Kumar, during his tenure as Director General of ICCR, and Tyagi had entered into a criminal conspiracy with Singh and Sharma to facilitate trafficking of nine individuals to Germany. The modus operandi adopted by the accused was to send nine people to Berlin along with a dance troupe. On arrival, these people disappeared and later filed applications seeking political asylum under changed names.
Read the full article
From Haaretz:
In a precedent-setting ruling yesterday the Haifa District Court yesterday sentenced two Haifa men to jail for trafficking in humans for the purpose of harvesting their organs.
John Allan (formerly Mohammad Gheit), 59, was sentenced to four years in jail with a three-year suspended sentence. Allan was also ordered to pay each of his six victims NIS 15,000. Hassan Zakhalka, 32, was sentenced to 20 months in prison and 12 months suspended sentence for aiding and abetting human trafficking for the harvest of organs. Advertisement This is the first time an Israeli court has issued a conviction for this offense, based on a law passed at the end of last year. The pair confessed to the charges against them in a plea bargain with the prosecution.
Allan and Zakhalka admitted that at the end of 2006, they persuaded Arabs from the Galilee and central Israel who were developmentally challenged or mentally ill to agree to have a kidney removed for payment. They located their victims by placing ads in the newspaper offering money for organ donation. According to the indictment, the pair gave false information to the donors, and also pressured and threatened them to give up their kidney. After the surgery, Allan and Zakhalka did not pay the donors as promised.
Read the full article
Here's a piece that provides an easy to digest overview of various articles and statistics on trafficking that were released last year.From Zenit:
The BBC on Nov. 6 noted that the United Nations in 2006 had named Israel one of the main destinations in the world for trafficked women. According to the report, during the 1990s and the first years of the current decade, up to 3,000 women a year were lured to Israel by false promises of jobs, only to find themselves forced to be prostitutes. Prostitution in Israel is legal, but pimping and maintaining a brothel are not, according to the BBC.
Japan is another country with significant numbers of women forced into being sex slaves, the South China Morning Post reported Oct. 27. Every year, 50,000 women enter Japan on entertainer visas, but sources cited by the newspaper maintained there are never that many working as dancers or singers.
Japan is one of the largest destinations for international trafficking of women and children for sex and forced labor, according to the South China Morning Post. Due to international pressure the Japanese police set up a department to combat the problem. In 2005 the new unit made 81 arrests, but only five cases have reached the prosecution stage in the courts, all ending with suspended sentences.
In England, an Oct. 22 article in the Independent newspaper reported the arrest of a gang of Lithuanian and Chinese criminals who made up to 5,000 pounds ($10,281) a day by forcing young women to engage in prostitution.
According to the Washington Post, estimating the number of women trafficked into the United States is problematic. Estimates vary widely, but one recent calculation put it at 14,500 to 17,500 each year.Read the full article
From the BBC:
UK government officials are accused of "betraying" human trafficking victims by delaying ratification of a European treaty. Shadow home secretary David Davis said the government had signed the treaty to "great fanfare" last year - but as yet had no plans to ratify it. The treaty covers a range of measures, including 30-day residence permits to victims to allow them to recover from their ordeal and reflect on whether they will help police prosecute offenders.
There had been some fears this could be open to abuse by people making false claims of being trafficking victims to remain in the country. A Home Office spokeswoman said the government had already introduced "wide ranging" anti-trafficking laws as well as setting up the Serious Organised Crime Agency and the UK Human Trafficking Centre. She added: "We have signed the Council of Europe Convention and will ratify as soon as we can. We are determined to get the arrangements right before we ratify. "This involves widespread consultation and primary and secondary legislation. This is not unique to the UK. Most other EU countries are in a similar position."
The Home Office says it has introduced anti-trafficking laws and will ratify the treaty as soon as possible.But Mr Davis said while the convention had been signed "amidst great fanfare last year", the government "doesn't even have a plan or timetable for ratification".
The government says research suggests 4,000 women in the UK are working in areas of sexual exploitation and may have been trafficked - or moved by force or deception with the aim of exploiting them.Read the full article
