Special Rapporteur of the UN Commission on Human Rights, Sigma Huda has heavily criticised Lebanon’s criminal code as liable to persecute victims while letting those who exploit the women go unpunished. It is estimated that more than one third of Lebanon’s 200,000 migrant workers have been trafficked into forced labour or forced prostitution.
“The [Lebanese] government appears to have recognized human trafficking as a problem,” said Sigma Huda, but then pointed to the fact that the penal code leads to double standards;
“A woman engaging in acts of prostitution may be subject to prosecution, detention and deportation. At the same time, the person that operates the “supernight clubs” to which the women are brought to find their clients, are operating legally according to administrative rules set by General Security,”
”The widely held attitudes of discrimination on the basis of race, colour, ethnicity and gender contribute to the prevalence of human trafficking,” said Hulda as she tried to raise awareness of the problem in Lebanon.

Some companies in Canada, US, UK, Germany and Switzerland are beginning to watch the activities of employees who travel very frequently to Asia, if they suspect them of engaging in child sex tourism. Private investigator P Kalastree, 58, is the managing director of Mainguard International Pte Ltd said that his firm in the Philippines has investigated 25 child sex cases in the last five years, for companies in the west. Some of the people they have been investigating have even set up businesses in Asia to give them an excuse to travel frequently to countries such as Philippines, Vietnam of Thailand.
“They may be from the IT or the garment trade. Most of the men are professionals such as engineers.”
Last year Mainguard International followed an Irish man in his 40s to Thailand and monitored him for six months.
“His employers suspected him of buying sex from children. He liked teenage girls around 14 to 16 years old and would frequent lounges where these girls would dance naked in front of him on bar tops.”
“Some of these lounges or nightclubs are connected to apartments and he would then take one or two of the girls to his room later.”
They submitted the information to his employers. His wife divorced him and sued him for compensation. Increasingly businesses are becoming vigilant against the possibility of their employees engaging in paedophile activities whilst on business trips. Such activities are not only immoral, but for businesses they also damage the name of the firm.

Police in the Indian state of Assam revealed yesterday that more than 500 women and children a year were trafficked out of the state into prostitution. They also claimed that the problem may actually get worse in the coming years.
Inspector-general of police (CID) G. Bhuyan said “The problem (in busting the racket) is lack of information on the girls or the persons responsible for their plight”. He also said that only a tiny minority of cases were reported to the police – only 22 in the last 5 years, which lead to 44 arrests.
“We despatch teams to different parts of country — mainly New Delhi, Haryana, Mumbai and Siliguri — as and when we get information about women being trafficked. We have to receive complaints to make arrests. It is difficult to just go and arrest somebody without proper information,” Bhuyan said.
Most of the victims were residents of areas along major rivers. “Traffickers generally target girls from poor families displaced by regular floods in these areas, take them outside the state and force them into prostitution.”
The problem is being caused by poverty, instability and unwillingness to report crimes against women. There also needs to be a greater allocation of resources to the problem by the police.

The number of women trafficked in Nepal this year has risen to 8,000 compared with around 6,600 last year, according to government official Maiti Nepal Prakash Gurung. The usual causes of poverty and gender discrimination are being compounded by the civil war between the King and Maoist rebels, with thousands of people being forced to leave their homes and so becoming more vulnerable to being trafficked. The increasing poverty in the country has also lead to more people becoming involved in organised crime. Another difficulty is that bail is being granted to people accused of human trafficking, which often leads to the accused absconding and not reporting back to the court. This leaves the impression that there is little stringency in the application of the law. Despite such a large number of people being trafficked, only 32 cases reached a verdict in 2004. Nepal has a law against human trafficking, but it needs to be more forcefully applied. Nepal will never deal fully with its problem with human trafficking, however, until there is more stability in the country.

When Katrina graduated from the local university in Smolensk, she found the financial pressures on her were hard to come with, so when she was offered a job in Bangkok as a waitress, she gladly accepted. She was one of a group of 50 women from Russia, Ukraine and Belarus being taken to Thailand by the same agent. When she reached Thailand, however, her passport was taken from her and she was told she was a debt slave. In order to pay off her traffickers she was forced into prostitution. She wasn’t able to escape for more than three years.
According to anti-trafficking organisations such as The Angel Coalition, this is not a rare story in Russia. In fact, in the past ten years, more than 500,000 women have been trafficked out of the former Soviet Union to more than 50 countries.
Oleg Kouzbit director of The Angel Coalition said;
“Few of these countries have laws to prevent trafficking or to prosecute traffickers, and these criminals are free to operate with impunity,”
The scale of the problem seems to be growing, with Moscow becoming a hub for trafficking activities.
One of the roots of the problem is low income causing desperation amongst women. The Moscow Centre for Gender Studies said in a report that the average monthly wage of women in Russia in 2004 was 6,929 roubles (230 dollars). The other problem is that Russia does not yet have a well defined anti-trafficking law. This should be put right next month when new legislation is set to be passed in the Duma. It is certain that Russia has much to do in the fight against trafficking.