Suriname Police Detain Alleged Human Trafficker

By Ivan Cairo

From Caribbean Net News:

PARAMARIBO, Suriname- Police in Suriname have arrested and subsequently detained a Korean national (49) on suspicion of human trafficking, a prosecutor has confirmed. The suspect was the captain on a fishing boat with four Vietnamese fishermen on board. The arrest came after one of the crew members committed suicide by hanging, to escape his ordeal.

Preliminary investigations have revealed, said prosecutor Garcia Paragsingh, that the four Vietnamese nationals working on the boat, were forced to hard labour on the vessel without payment, proper medical care and food. For over a two year period, two of ill-treated crew members did not receive payment for their work, while the remaining two fishermen told police that for over one year they did not receive salaries and were not allowed to leave the boat.

The captain, a Korean national, allegedly refused to allow them to see a doctor when they became sick, while they were forced to work long hours under very poor conditions even when they were physically unable to do so. According to police sources, the worker who committed suicide apparently got sick and asked to be taken to shore to seek medical treatment. After his requests were rejected by the captain, the man hung himself.

The suspected trafficker was arrested by officers of the Trafficking in Persons Unit of the Suriname Police Force (KPS) said police spokeswoman Maritha Ritfeld-Asontoe. According to the spokeswoman, the captain refused to pay salaries, telling his crew that there was no money.

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Bangladeshi Victims of Trafficking in Yemen

From the Yemen Times:

A group of 15 Bangladeshis have been imprisoned by the Department of Immigration and are awaiting departure, said a source within the department on Tuesday. The arrests have brought to light the plight of approximately 3,000 Bangladesh nationals who were illegally trafficked into Yemen and work in conditions close to indentured servitude.

The departmental source did not want to give more details about the Bangladeshis' custody conditions, because he was directed not to speak to the media.

The Yemen Times received an appeal letter entitled “Bangladeshi nationals are suffering,” on Sunday that referred to the 15 arrested Bangladeshis.

The letter said that some Bangladeshi "brokers" are bringing workers from Bangladesh, providing them with tourist visas to enter Yemen and promising them high salaries of up to US $500 per month, with the support of Yemeni sponsors.

“After bringing these potential workers to Yemen, 'brokers' engage them in inferior jobs illegally, which don’t match what they were offered," said the letter. "Most of the time they don’t provide work [at all].” The letter revealed the names of four major Bangladeshi brokers, including Kabir Hussein, Anamul Hoque, Harunur Rashid and A. Rahman.

According to a reliable Bangladeshi source who asked to remain anonymous, “the "brokers" take US $4,000 for each Bangladeshi worker and give them hope of good jobs and salaries,” he said. “However, they mostly find themselves working as cleaners at restaurants and companies or construction workers."

The source said that there are currently at least 3,000 illegal Bangladeshi workers in Yemen who end up taking menial jobs because they have no other choice. They receive between US $100-130 per month, or approximately three dollars per day.

According to Yemeni labor laws, foreigners are not allowed to work in Yemen without proper labor permits, which must be issued by the government. Frequently in cases like these, the foreigners are arrested and deported.

"For this reason, so many poor Bangladeshi innocent people are suffering in Yemen," said the Bangladeshi source. "Some of them are unemployed and some are working illegally with very low earnings, which aren’t sufficient for their livelihood, as they don’t have any other choice.”

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At-risk Teens Learn of Perils of Trafficking

By Susan Cuthbert

From World Vision:

More than 1,500 students are learning about the dangers of human trafficking through dramatic sketches at rural primary schools near Banja Luka, western Bosnia and Herzegovina. This World Vision-supported pilot project brings together key members of the community in interactive workshops to drive home a vital message of prevention.

The performances, portraying young people who are unwittingly drawn into the dangerous trade, are accompanied by interactive sessions with experts from the state government agency and experienced charities. At least one local police officer attends each presentation, so that students know who to turn to in a risky situation.

Bosnia and Herzegovina is a country of origin, transit, and destination for women and girls trafficked internationally and internally for the purpose of commercial sexual exploitation. Over the last year, an increased number of Bosnian victims were trafficked for commercial sexual exploitation within the country, according to the United States Department Trafficking Persons Report, 2007.

'Our goal is to raise awareness among primary school students in these vulnerable communities about the realities of trafficking so that they understand how people are recruited, the effects on victims, and where they can go for help,' says Dijana Kremenovic, project coordinator for World Vision's Banja Luka office.

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A Disappointing Life in the Promised Land

By Matt Siegel

From Russia Profile:

TEL AVIV, Israel- Although Israel has only two official state languages—Hebrew and Arabic—it’s difficult to find a restaurant that doesn’t have a Cyrillic menu in the winding alleys of Jerusalem or the wide main boulevard in Haifa. Everywhere, second-hand shops and luxury chains alike hawk their wares to Israel’s Russian population. While these signs can, and often should, be perceived as a sign of hospitality toward Russian speakers, at other times, they signify something radically different.

For Jews, Israel is the “Promised Land,” the biblical home held out as the prospect of a final end to millennia of wandering. But for many thousands of people from the former Soviet Union, Israel held out a different sort of promise: a respite from the crushing poverty of the post-Soviet economic and social decline.

According to experts in Israel and Russia, many of these people, whose hopes and dreams were exploited for nearly two decades, became part of the vast illegal network of human trafficking that fueled the sprawling Israeli archipelago of prostitution and domestic slavery. It now appears, however, that what had for so long seemed to be an intractable problem for both Russia and Israel, is finally beginning to show signs of improvement.

The good news
The U.S. State Department’s scathing 2006 indictment of Israel’s inactivity in combating human trafficking, which nearly relegated the country to the level of North Korea and Sudan, appears to have been the final straw for the government of the Jewish state. Since then, the government of Israel, working together with a tight network of domestic NGOs, has made tremendous inroads against human trafficking from the former Soviet Union. A raft of new laws and tougher enforcement policies, together with increased cooperation on extradition from regional governments, has helped reduce the peak number of trafficking cases by some 90 percent.

“A lot has been done. It’s actually virtually miraculous how much has been done. I feel that we have a more humane system here: more has been attained here than has, in many ways, been accomplished in the United States,” said Rahel Gershuni, National Coordinator in the Battle Against Trafficking in Human Beings within the Israel Ministry of Justice. “Look, there’s a lot left to do, I’m not saying no, but a lot of progress [has been made].”

According to an October 2007 report by the Ministry of Justice entitled “Trafficking in Persons in Israel,” the police estimate that the trade in women reached its peak in 2003, with 3,000 people being trafficked. The same report claims that this number had dropped to “a few hundred, up to 1,000 in 2005-6.” Due to the problematic nature of documenting an illicit trade, these statistics are almost certainly incorrect. The positive trend, however, has been confirmed by multiple experts with street level knowledge of the situation.

But despite all the good news — and nearly everyone agrees that the news has been good — there is a dark side to the story. Deprived of a steady supply of women from Russia and the former Soviet Republics, internal traffickers are increasingly turning to Israeli citizens, a great number of whom appear to be native Russian speakers who immigrated to Israel legally. The lost children of Russia’s Diaspora live in sub-human conditions on the streets of Tel Aviv and other Israeli cities, many addicted to drugs, all victims of a cruel cycle of exclusion and desperation.

Falling through the cracks
Israel’s improbable victory in the 1967 Six-Day War, in which 264,000 Israeli soldiers delivered a crushing defeat to almost 550,000 soldiers from the combined armies of Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Jordan, led to a massive awakening of Zionist sentiments among the Jews of the former Soviet Union. A surge in protests and lobbying both internally and abroad led to the first wave of emigration of Soviet Jews to Israel in 1969. Emigration continued at a trickle throughout the 1970s and 1980s, with the plight of Soviet Jews becoming a key bargaining chip in the Cold War power struggle. In 1990, with the implosion of the Soviet Union, that trickle turned into a raging river that carried more than a million Russian speaking Jews to Israel over the next decade.

As the social safety nets crumbled beneath millions of former Soviet citizens, many thousands of desperate people, including women with no prospects in their home countries, decided to follow the path of Soviet Jews and flee their homeland for brighter prospects. Israel, with its large population of Russian-speakers (by some estimates as much as one-third of the country), and its porous border with Egypt, became a prime destination for the smuggling of human beings.

“We were all so happy, you know; the wicked Communists fell, but at least when the Communists were in power, people had some sort of welfare network,” said Gershuni. “They weren’t hungry. They may have been in prison for dissenting, but they weren’t hungry.”

According to an unnamed source with first-hand knowledge of Israeli law enforcement, the system for trafficking women from the former Soviet Union has not changed much since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

In most cases, women from all over the region respond to advertisements placed in local media sources looking for exotic dancers or models. According to experts in Israel, these are code words well known in the countries that once comprised the Soviet Union, and very few of the women are unaware of the fact that they will be engaging in prostitution once in Israel. What many of them don’t know is that the glossy descriptions given to them in ads or even by former prostitutes sent as recruiters are often very far from the truth.

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Harvard Online Conference on Sex Trafficking Set for April 15

The Women and Public Policy Program at the Harvard Kennedy School presents:

"Combating International Sex Trafficking: Best Practices"

Tuesday, April 15, 2008: 2:00 - 4:00 p.m. (EDT)

-Online Event. Registration required, and free of charge.-

Every year, an estimated 800,000 persons are trafficked across national borders, and many of these victims are trafficked into the sex trade, the largest subcategory of modern-day slavery. Sex trafficking is an international crisis, and a rising global health concern.

This online conference will focus on the best practices to combat international sex trafficking. Ample time will be allocated for audience Q&A. The discussion will be co-moderated by Ambassador Swanee Hunt, Director, Women and Public Policy Program, Harvard Kennedy School and Ambassador John Miller, former Director, Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, U.S. State Department. The panel will feature:

• Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney (D-NY)
• Dr. Mohamed Mattar - Executive Director, The Protection Project, The John Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies
• Congresswoman Linda Smith (R-WA) and Founder, Shared Hope International

For more information and to register, please visit the event page.

Mozambique Government Accepts Stiffer Penalties for Human Trafficking

From AllAfrica:

The Mozambican government favours stiffer penalties for criminals found guilty of trafficking in people, Justice Minister Benvinda Levi said on Thursday.

She was speaking at a parliamentary hearing organised by the several of the working commissions of the country's parliament, the Assembly of the Republic, on bills presented by the government on child protection and on human trafficking. The hearing took place just days after testimony about the trafficking in minors was presented on Mozambique Television (TVM) by two teenagers rescued from a brothel in South Africa.

The Assembly's Legal Affairs, Social Affairs, and Defence and Public Order Commissions are drawing up written opinions on the bills with the assistance of a technical team from the Justice Ministry. The bills will be debated on the floor of the Assembly in the second week of April.

The government bill envisaged prison terms of between eight and 12 years for trafficking in people. But at the hearing Antonio Frangoulis of the ruling Frelimo Party, argued that there should be stiffer penalties for the worst forms of trafficking.

He thought it wrong to apply the same penalty for trafficking women to take part in pornographic films, and trafficking people who would be murdered for the removal of their genitals (used in grisly witchcraft rituals). The bill as it stands does not make this differentiation, and only recognises a single crime of human trafficking.

Levi accepted the proposal for harsher penalties, and also a suggestion by Maximo Dias, of the opposition Renamo-Electoral Union coalition, that people suspected of human trafficking should not be eligible for bail or other forms of provisional freedom."Those suspected of human trafficking should be kept in jail until their trial", declared Dias.Both Levi and Dias seem to have forgotten that in February 2000 the Supreme Court ruled there could be no such thing as a crime for which suspects could never be eligible for bail.

Automatic bail refusals were "contrary to constitutional principles", the court ruled.

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Kenya Conference AddressesTrafficking

A Somali refugee camp in Kenya

By Daniel Nyassy

From the Daily Nation:

Kenya- Underage girls are being trafficked in Malindi for sex, a seminar heard Sunday.

Most of the girls are from upcountry villages in Kenya. Somali women and girls are also targeted.

A two-day seminar at Eden Roc Hotel heard that a vibrant tourism sector was a major attraction for human trafficking. The seminar was sponsored by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM).

IOM project officer Ms Lara Quarterman said the driving force for girl trafficking in Malindi was sexual exploitation. Participants testified that many underage girls were ferried to Malindi, especially during tourist high seasons, for sexual exploitation.

A document presented at the seminar indicated that Kenya was also a transit country for trafficked women and children from South Asia, Somalia and Ethiopia to the Middle East and South Africa.
“Kenya is a source, transit and destination country for men, women and children trafficked for forced labour and sexual exploitation,” said the document titled Basic Concept and Terminology of Trafficking in Persons by Ms Quarterman.

Kenyans are trafficked to European countries for domestic labour and sexual exploitation, said the document. The document says refugees and asylum seekers are vulnerable, especially women and children.

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