Key senators seek briefing on US human trafficking report

The report is also the world’s most comprehensive resource of government efforts to combat modern slavery. The US classes countries that fully comply with its Trafficking Victims Protection Act’s (TVPA) minimum standards as Tier-I nations.

Although trafficking itself is a cross-border activity, with internal trafficking representing only 19 percent of cases according to IOM’s Global Trafficking Database, in Afghanistan this trend is reversed as 60 percent were trafficked within the country and 40 percent taken across borders, most notably to Iran and Pakistan, according to US Department of State’s trafficking reports.

“Over 100 countries have passed anti-trafficking laws and many have established specialised law-enforcement units, specialised victim assistance mechanisms and public awareness campaigns”.

See the full text of the report here and the section on Sri Lanka here. Romanian men, women, and children are subjected to labor trafficking in agriculture, construction, domestic service, hotels, and manufacturing, as well as forced begging and theft in Romania and other European countries. In many cases traffickers are related to or are close acquaintances of those they are exploiting.

The report says the Marshall Islands government is not making significant efforts to improve its record and has failed to effectively implement anti-trafficking laws, with no efforts made to identify victims and a lack of stringent penalties for adult trafficking.

“We recognize that U.S. policy and engagement on trafficking does not exist in a vacuum, and we appreciate the many varied and nuanced trade-offs that are necessary between competing policy issues”, they wrote in the letter, which was released by their offices. Disturbingly, the very young are at particular risk, especially our girls since it is estimated that 21 per cent of all trafficked persons are girls. Children sent to work as domestic servants for their wealthier relatives are vulnerable to forced labor or, to a lesser extent, commercial sexual exploitation.

On the World Day against Trafficking in Persons today, the United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon shares his thoughts about human trafficking and our collective responsibility to address it effectively.

In the wake of the report’s release, several Liberians mostly females have termed as embarrassing, the U.S. report. “The government provided anti-trafficking training or guidance for its diplomatic personnel”, the report concluded its part on Egypt.

The U.S. Embassy in Nassau congratulates the Government of the Commonwealth of The Bahamas on its Tier 1 ranking in the 2015 TIP Report.

As a result of this improvement, Bahrain has had its status upgraded from the report’s “Tier 2 watch list“, which is reserved for countries that require additional scrutiny, to simply “Tier 2” – in recognition of the government’s significant efforts to bring itself into compliance with worldwide standards.

You might wonder what one person can do about an entrenched and pervasive crime like human trafficking.

Sewall said the discovery of the mass graves in Malaysia happened nearly two months beyond the current reporting period. Government officials have been convicted of human trafficking crimes, and there have been reported instances of local officials obstructing trafficking investigations.