Tag Archives: Human Trafficking

Nepal quake survivors struggle with debt, raising trafficking fears

By Rina Chandran

KATHMANDU (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Hundreds of Nepalis who had borrowed money to rebuild their lives after two earthquakes left them homeless are at risk of being trafficked or duped into selling their kidneys to pay off their debts, an international development organization said.

Nepal received $4.1 billion in pledges from donors for reconstruction after quakes last April and May killed 9,000 people, injured at least 22,000 and damaged or destroyed more than 900,000 houses in the Himalayan nation.

More than a year on, reconstruction has been slow with unrest over a new constitution adding to the delays. Unable to find work, hundreds of Nepalis are deep in debt, the Asia Foundation said on Tuesday.

“Their ability to pay is very limited and indebtedness makes them more vulnerable to exploitation,” said Nandita Baruah, Asia Foundation’s deputy country representative in Kathmandu.

“Their desperation makes them take greater risks, such as sending their children away for what they think are better lives, or even selling their kidneys,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in an interview.

“We’re going to see an uptick in people moving out to earn money as their debts become due. Some of them will be trafficked,” Baruah added.

Nepal’s economy is highly dependent on remittances sent back by its migrant workers, which make up about 30 percent of its gross domestic product.

Following the earthquakes, hundreds of migrant workers returned to Nepal to help their families.

Many are likely to have paid their employers to be allowed to return home, going without wages for several months while spending money on rebuilding, Baruah said.

“These are workers who pay 200,000-500,000 rupees ($1,850-$4,640) to go abroad in the first place, and are very likely still paying off that debt,” she said.

“The quakes exacerbated their indebtedness,” she said.

BORDER CHECKS

Activists say there are signs of an increase in the number of Nepali women and children being trafficked after last year’s disaster.

Anti-trafficking charity Maiti Nepal said it stopped 745 women and children – suspected victims of human trafficking – at the Nepal-India border in the three months following the earthquakes.

That compares with 615 such interceptions in the three months before the quakes, their data showed.

Nepal is both a source and a destination country for victims of human trafficking with some 8,500 Nepalis trafficked every year, according to the country’s human rights commission.

Women are typically trafficked for sex work, domestic work and forced marriages to India, the Middle East, China and South Korea – while men are made to work in construction, as drivers and in hotels in India, the Middle East and Southeast Asia.

Some victims are duped into selling their kidneys and brought to India, where a chronic organ shortage has fueled a black-market trade in illegal transplants, activists say.

Nepal’s economy is forecast by the Asian Development Bank to have grown only about 1.5 percent in the fiscal year to mid-July after reconstruction delays and trade disruptions. A recovery is dependent on the pace of reconstruction, it said.

“Now, the aid will also stop flowing. We’re going to see more migration, more trafficking,” said Baruah.

“Those who have taken on debt don’t have options,” she said.

(Reporting by Rina Chandran @rinachandran, Editing by Katie Nguyen. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women’s rights, trafficking, corruption and climate change. Visit news.trust.org to see more stories.)

U.S. places Myanmar on worst offenders list in human trafficking

A boy walks among debris after fire destroyed shelters at a camp for internally displaced Rohingya Muslims in the western Rakhine Stat

By Matt Spetalnick, Jason Szep and Antoni Slodkowski

WASHINGTON/YANGON (Reuters) – The United States has decided to place Myanmar on its global list of worst offenders in human trafficking, officials said, a move aimed at prodding the country’s new democratically elected government and its still-powerful military to do more to curb the use of child soldiers and forced labor.

The reprimand of Myanmar comes despite U.S. efforts to court the strategically important country to help counteract China’s rise in the region and build a Southeast Asian bulwark against Beijing’s territorial assertiveness in the South China Sea.

Myanmar’s demotion, part of the State Department’s closely watched annual Trafficking in Persons (TIP) report due to be released on Thursday, also appears intended to send a message of U.S. concern about continued widespread persecution of the Rohingya Muslim minority in the Buddhist-majority nation.

The country’s new leader, democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi, has been criticized internationally for neglecting the Rohingya issue since her administration took office this year.

Washington has faced a complex balancing act over Myanmar, a former military dictatorship that has emerged from decades of international isolation since launching sweeping political changes in 2011.

President Barack Obama’s diplomatic opening to Myanmar is widely seen as a key foreign policy achievement as he enters his final seven months in office, but even as he has eased some sanctions he has kept others in place to maintain leverage for further reforms.

At the same time, Washington wants to keep Myanmar from slipping back into China’s orbit at a time when U.S. officials are trying to forge a unified regional front.

The U.S. decision to drop Myanmar to “Tier 3,” the lowest grade, putting it alongside countries like Iran, North Korea and Syria, was confirmed by a U.S. official in Washington and a Bangkok-based official from an international organization informed of the move. Another person familiar with the matter said: “I’m not going to turn you away from this conclusion.” All spoke on condition of anonymity.

A Tier 3 rating can trigger sanctions limiting access to U.S. and international aid. But U.S. presidents frequently waive such action.

The decision on Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, was one of the most hotly contested in this year’s report, and followed concerns that some assessments in last year’s human trafficking report were watered down for political reasons.

There was intense internal debate between senior U.S. diplomats who wanted to reward Myanmar for progress on political reforms and U.S. human rights experts who argued that not enough was being done to curb human trafficking, the U.S. official said.

A Reuters investigation published last August found that senior diplomats repeatedly overruled the State Department’s anti-trafficking unit and inflated the grades of 14 strategically important countries. The State Department denied any political considerations but U.S. lawmakers called for reforms in the decision-making process.

This year’s decision on Myanmar marked a win for the State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, which was set up to independently grade countries’ efforts to prevent modern slavery, such as the illegal trade in humans for forced labor or prostitution.

Because Myanmar had been on the so-called “Tier 2 Watch List” for the maximum four years permitted by law, the State Department either had to justify an upgrade or else automatically downgrade it. A Tier 3 ranking means that anti-trafficking efforts do not meet “minimum standards” and it is “not making significant efforts to do so.”

State Department spokesman John Kirby said: “We will not comment on the contents of this year’s report until after the report is released.”

CHILD SOLDIERS

Deliberations on Myanmar’s record focused heavily on efforts to halt the military’s recruitment and use of child soldiers as well as forced labor, especially the coercion of local villagers to perform some work. Such practices have been documented by international human rights groups and are also outlined in last year’s State Department report.

A key issue that the U.S. administration considered before Myanmar’s downgrade was alleged government complicity in human trafficking, including its failure to prosecute any civilian officials for their involvement in it, according to the person familiar with the situation. While the Myanmar military is credited with significant progress toward curbing the use of child soldiers, such as allowing international inspections of military bases, there was no indication the problem had been completely eradicated as the U.S. anti-trafficking office had urged, the source said.Human rights groups had lobbied U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry against upgrading Myanmar, saying it would be unearned.

The diplomatic blow to Myanmar’s government could be softened by the fact that the TIP report covered efforts during the year ending in March, under the previous administration of former junta general Thein Sein.

Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace laureate, assumed her government role in April, after her party won the country’s first democratic elections in five decades.

But with the generals still controlling three security ministries and holding a lock on 25 percent of seats in parliament, U.S. officials grappled with whether a downgrade could undermine cooperation from the military against human trafficking.

For her part, Suu Kyi has recently unsettled U.S. officials by calling on them not to use the term “Rohingya” to refer to the Muslim minority in the country’s north. Many in Myanmar refer to them as “Bengalis,” insinuating that they are stateless illegal immigrants.

The United States has urged Myanmar to treat them as citizens.

The 2015 TIP report highlighted that the government’s denial of citizenship to an estimated 800,000 men, women and children in Burma — the majority of them ethnic Rohingya — “significantly increased this population’s vulnerability to trafficking”.

“The chronic, chronic abuse of the Rohingya has not been dealt with at all,” a U.S. congressional aide said, suggesting support on Capitol Hill for a downgrade this year.

(Additional reporting by Patricia Zengerle in Washington and Andrew R.C. Marshall in Bangkok; Writing by Matt Spetalnick; editing by Stuart Grudgings.)

Almost 80 percent of Indian women face public harassment in cities

A woman adjusts her scarf as the sun sets over Kashmir's Dal Lake in Srinagar

By Nita Bhalla

NEW DELHI (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Nearly four out of five women in India have faced public harassment ranging from staring, insults and wolf-whistling to being followed, groped or even raped, said a survey by the charity ActionAid UK.

The study – which polled over 500 women in cities across India – found that 84 percent of the respondents who experienced harassment were aged between 25 and 35 years old and were largely working women and students.

“For us in India the findings are not big news, what is noteworthy of the 500 women interviewed in India, is the extent to which women have responded and reported boldly about facing harassment and violence,” Sandeep Chachra, ActionAid India’s executive director, said on Monday.

“It is as if society is telling women that public spaces are not for them, and what is more interesting is that women are asserting their claim of these spaces.”

Indian women face a barrage of threats ranging from child marriage, dowry killings and human trafficking to rape and domestic violence, largely due to deep-rooted attitudes that view them as inferior to men.

There were 337,922 reports of violence against women such as rape, molestation, abduction and cruelty by husbands in 2014, up nine percent from the previous year, according to the latest data from India’s National Crime Records Bureau.

The online survey, which was released on Friday, was conducted by British market research firm YouGov in early May. It polled 502 women living in cities across the country, including New Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai and Kolkata.

It said women faced harassment in multiple places – on the street, in parks, at community events, on college campuses and while traveling on public transport.

“CULTURE OF HARASSMENT”

Over a third of the Indian women surveyed said they had been groped in public or faced someone exposing themselves, while more than half reported that they had been followed.

Forty-six percent reported insults and name-calling in public, 44 percent experienced wolf-whistling, 16 percent had been drugged and nine percent reported they had been raped.

A wave of public protests after the fatal gang rape of a woman on a Delhi bus in December 2012 jolted many in the world’s second most populous country out of apathy and forced the government to enact stiffer penalties on gender crimes.

This included the death sentence for repeat rape offenders, criminalizing stalking and voyeurism, and making acid attacks and human trafficking specific offences.

Since then, a spike in media reports, government campaigns and civil society programs have increased public awareness of women’s rights and emboldened victims to register abuses.

But activists say the figures are still gross underestimates, as many victims remain reluctant to report crimes such as sexual violence for fear their families and communities will shun them.

ActionAid representatives urged authorities to work toward ending patriarchal mindsets and sexist attitudes which they said were to blame for this “culture of harassment.”

“Safety of women is directly related to patriarchal mind sets that manifests itself in streets, homes and workplaces,” said Sehjo Singh, ActionAid India’s director of programs and policy.

“The fear of harassment and violence has a crippling effect on women’s abilities and potential, and in itself it is an attack on women’s rights.”

(Reporting by Nita Bhalla, Editing by Ros Russell. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women’s rights, trafficking, corruption and climate change. Visit news.trust.org)

Fisherman tells Thai court~ beer tab led to years of slavery

By Alisa Tang

BANGKOK (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – A fisherman from Myanmar described meeting a job broker while having a beer with a friend in the fishing port town of Kantang in southern Thailand.

While chatting with the broker, he passed out drunk, without paying for his beer. Four days later, the broker told him he owed her 2,000 baht ($50) for his unpaid beer and his four-day stay in her home, and would have to work to pay off his debt.

He ended up enslaved on a fishing boat, working five years without pay, he told a court in Thailand’s southern Trang province as the proceedings began last week in a human trafficking case against nine defendants.

The defendants include the broker, as well as the owner of Boonlarp Fishing Co. Ltd., whom prosecutors say is the chief of the trafficking ring.

“This case is important because before the police could only catch the small fish, but this is the first time they got the big fish,” said Papop Siamhan, a lawyer for the trafficking victims and project coordinator for the Human Rights and Development Foundation (HRDF) rights group.

The defendants have denied all charges, Papop said.

Thailand has come under fire after numerous reports uncovered slavery and human trafficking in its multibillion-dollar seafood industry.

The government recently amended its laws in an effort to combat human trafficking and slavery, ratcheting up penalties to life imprisonment and the death penalty in cases where their victims had died.

The Issara Institute, a Bangkok-based anti-trafficking organization, has been a key point of contact for these trafficked fishermen and said reports of abuses on fishing boats operating out of Kantang began as early as 2008.

Fishermen from Myanmar on boats run by Boonlarp began calling Issara Institute’s 24-hour hotline to complain of being exploited and physically abused in May 2015.

Threats against the fishermen escalated, until on Oct. 14, 2015, one fishermen phoned the hotline and said a captain had threatened to behead him and throw his body overboard. He pleaded with the hotline operator: “I do not want to die young. Please help us!”, according to the Issara Institute.

Last October, Thai authorities from several agencies, working with the Issara Institute, went out to sea and rescued men from the Boonlarp boats.

Last Friday, the Kantang case kicked off the first of 42 court hearings scheduled over five months, but the plaintiffs’ lawyers filed a motion at the second hearing on Thursday to move the case to a court in Bangkok.

“We wanted to move the case because we are worried about the safety of the victims,” said Preeda Tongchumnum, another lawyer on the case, who works with the Solidarity Center, a U.S.-based worker rights organization.

“They have faced abuse by the broker and her husband, so they are scared, Even though they’re under the care of state authorities, if they come to Bangkok, they would feel safer,” she said.

Proceedings have been adjourned until July 26, when the Supreme Court’s decision on the motion to move the case will be read.

The defense lawyers on the case could not be reached for comment.

(Reporting by Alisa Tang, editing by Ros Russell. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women’s rights, corruption and climate change. Visit http://news.trust.org to see more stories)

Italy breaks up people-smuggling ring that imprisoned migrants

Migrants are seen aboard the British vessel HMS Enterprise before disembarking in the Sicilian

ROME (Reuters) – Italian police arrested seven people on Wednesday for running a people-smuggling ring in which Somali boat migrants who reached Italy by boat were held prisoner until their families paid their passage further north, a statement said.

A court in Catania in eastern Sicily ordered that 13 people be detained for running the smuggling operation, but only seven were picked up. The others were thought to be living abroad.

The investigation, dubbed “Somalia Express”, raided nine apartments in and around Catania used by the group to hold migrants in lieu of payment. Thirty-seven Somalis were freed from the apartments when the arrests were made, including three minors, the police statement said.

Families used pre-paid credit cards, or hawala, an informal payment system based on personal relationships, to pay off the smugglers, who would pick them up from migrant shelters in Sicily and neighboring Calabria, at the southern end of the Italian peninsula.

The money was then used to buy bus or train tickets for the migrants to send them to their final destination further north in Europe or within Italy, and for fake documents that allowed them to move freely, police said.

“These organized networks could continue to grow. We’re not optimistic,” Catania police chief Marcello Cardona told reporters after the arrests. Catania investigators broke up a similar group focused on Eritrean migrants in 2014.

As of May 10, 31,250 migrants had reached Italy by boat this year, a 14 percent decline from the same period last year, according to the Interior Ministry. This year, about 2,500 Somalis have reached Italy, compared with 12,176 last year.

Italy is one of the front-line countries in Europe’s worst migration crisis since World War Two. More than 320,000 came to Italy by boat in 2014-15, fleeing poverty and persecution at home and seeking a better life in Europe.

(Reporting by Steve Scherer; Editing by Mark Heinrich)

India working to curb trafficking of women and children

India’s Women and Child Welfare minister Maneka Gandhi, works on a computer before an interview with Reuters at her office in New Delhi, India, October 19, 2015.

By Nita Bhalla

NEW DELHI (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – India is working to find ways to curb the widespread trafficking of women and children in the country, including those from neighboring Nepal, Bangladesh and Pakistan, said Maneka Gandhi, India’s minister for women and children.

South Asia, with India at its center, is the fastest-growing and second-largest region for human trafficking in the world, after East Asia, according to the United Nations Office for Drugs and Crime.

Speaking at a conference on child adoption in India’s northeastern state of Meghalaya, Gandhi told delegates that the government was in the process of putting in place a series of policies to prevent human trafficking.

“We have discussed this issue in the cabinet. We had called a meeting with these countries last month in which all NGOs working on this and others in Nepal, Pakistan and Bangladesh came,” she said on Monday.

“We will have another meeting next week in India. We are telling each other what we can do. This month, we are going to see that specific solutions come into being.”

According to the National Crime Records Bureau, there were 5,466 cases of human trafficking registered in 2014, an increase of 90 percent over the past five years.

Activists say this is a gross under-estimation of the scale of the problem, as much of the illicit organized crime is underground.

They claim thousands of people – largely poor, rural women and children – are lured to India’s towns and cities each year by traffickers who promise good jobs but sell them into domestic work or sex work or to industries such as textile workshops.

In many cases, they are not paid or are held in debt bondage. Some go missing, and their families cannot trace them.

Gandhi said India’s remote northeastern states, which include Assam, Sikkim, Manipur, Arunachal Pradesh and Nagaland, were a key source area for trafficking and called for the appointment of a special female police officer in each village to keep a check on crimes against women and children.

“There is an enormous amount of trafficking of children going on from the northeast. We find them in Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and many going to Malaysia and Thailand. It is not fair,” she said.

“The job of special women police is to be vigilant in the village and see that children do not go missing, women are not beaten by husbands, girls are sent to school.”

A comprehensive new anti-trafficking law is also being drafted, say government officials. This will not only unify several existing laws, but also raise penalties for offenders and provide victims with rehabilitation and compensation.

The law, which is expected to be ready by the end of the year, will also provide for the establishment of a central investigative anti-trafficking agency to coordinate and work between states and special courts to hear such cases.

(Reporting by Nita Bhalla, editing by Alex Whiting. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women’s rights, trafficking, corruption and climate change. Visit news.trust.org)

Republicans Compromise On Language In Human Trafficking Bill

Republicans in the Senate changed language in a human trafficking bill that caused Democrats to not pass the bill.

The Justice for Victims of Human Trafficking Act had been proposed last month by Senator John Cornyn of Texas and sought to significantly increase penalties for those convicted of exploiting children, engaging in human smuggling or holding women as sex slaves and forcing them into prostitution.

The bill also included a statement that money collected from fines could not be used for abortions.  Democrats said that part of the bill was expanding federal prohibitions beyond the Hyde Amendment and thus blocked the bill.

The revision of the bill has two separate funds where the fines will go to non-medical issues related to helping the victims of trafficking including legal representatives and increased law enforcement.  The second fund comes from appropriations already set aside for community health centers which falls under the Hyde Amendment.

“I’m thrilled we were finally able to come together to break the impasse over this vital legislation, and I look forward to swift passage in the Senate so we can ensure victims of human trafficking receive the resources they need to restore their lives,” Senator Cornyn said.

A spokesman of the Family Research Council stated in 2013 there is a strong connection between human trafficking and the abortion industry.

“Abortion and human trafficking are evils every thoughtful Christian should oppose. Virtually all evangelicals would agree with that statement. What is not always considered, however, is the troubling relationship between these things and how they build upon one another in a growing cascade of moral horror,” Rob Schwarzwalder wrote.

Democrats Block Human Trafficking Bill Over Abortion

Members of the Senate are blocking a bill to help victims of human trafficking because of language related to abortion funding.

The Justice for Trafficking Victims Act, introduced by Senator John Cornyn of Texas, would increase penalties on people involved in human trafficking.

“The bill imposes an additional penalty of $5,000 on any non-indigent person or entity convicted of a crime involving: (1) peonage, slavery, or trafficking in persons; (2) sexual abuse; (3) sexual exploitation and other abuse of children; (4) transportation for illegal sexual activity; or (5) human smuggling in violation of the Immigration and Nationality Act,” read S. 178’s summary.

“The bill expands the definition of ‘child abuse’ under the Victims of Child Abuse Act of 1990 to include human trafficking and the production of child pornography and expands criminal sanctions to include persons who patronize or solicit children for commercial sex acts (buyers).”

Some Democratic members of the Senate are holding up the bill because of language that would prohibit funding going to pay for abortions by those rescued from human trafficking.

Senator Dick Durban of Illinois has filed an amendment to allow abortion funding to be part of the package.

Houston Police Rescue Human Trafficking Victims

Houston police received a desperate phone call pleading with them to come and save a family who was being held by smugglers.

The police raided a south Harris County home where they thought the woman and children were being held and instead discovered 110 people who were trapped inside a rancid “stash house” where human traffickers were holding them for ransom.

Authorities say at least three traffickers have been arrested in connection to the house.

The victims were kept without clothing and shoes in an attempt to keep them from attempting to flee the house.   The windows were boarded up from the inside and there were bars on the doors and windows.

The victims were between 5 and 47 years old and the majority were men.  They were taken to hospitals for treatment for dehydration and malnutrition.

Survey Shows 30 Million Worldwide Held As Slaves

A new report on human trafficking and slavery worldwide shows that around 30 million people are enslaved, nearly half of them in India.

The survey by Australian-based group Walk Free said that the found human trafficking in all 162 countries surveyed.

“Today some people are still being born into hereditary slavery, a staggering but harsh reality, particularly in parts of West Africa and South Asia,” the report states. “Other victims are captured or kidnapped before being sold or kept for exploitation, whether through ‘marriage’, unpaid labour on fishing boats, or as domestic workers. Others are tricked and lured into situations they cannot escape, with false promises of a good job or an education.”

India, where almost 14 million people are enslaved either in bonded labor or commercial sex exploitation, was the clear leader in the statistics. China was second with 2.9 million people in slavery, followed by Pakistan (2.1 million), Nigeria (701,000) and Ethiopia (651,000).

The survey also listed countries based on slavery totals per capita. Moldova, where Stella’s Voice is located, was in the top 6 nations of slaves per capita.