Irish Member of the European Parliament, and host of Business Travellers against Human Trafficking at the Parliament, Simon Coveney has called on the Irish government to offer temporary residency permits to all victims of trafficking into forced labour and sexual exploitation. Presenting his report on human trafficking to the European Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, Mr Coveney said that;
“Human trafficking is rooted in poverty; the victims are usually women and they are forced into dangerous, illegal or abusive work,”
“Many of the women who are trafficked are heading for a life of prostitution. They are often promised jobs and a better life but end up working against their will in the sex industry, living in fear of the police, their pimps and the authorities who might send them back.”
“People who are trafficked are victims, and we should not lose sight of that fact.”
In the report Mr Coveney also called on other EU states to implement the Council Directive on Residence Permits so that victims could at least have temporary residency if they co-operate with law enforcement officials.
To read more about this and other related issues, please visit Ireland Online, by clicking here.

Two Vietnamese nationals have been charged with human trafficking in Cambodia, after a paedophile ring was uncovered, supplying children as young as ten to sex tourists. German police will travel to Cambodia after two German citizens were arrested on child sex offences. An investigation will be held to see if the trafficking ring has further connections to Germany. Certainly the German nationals can also face charges in their own country with regard to the abuse of children abroad. Another Vietnamese national was charged with selling her own children for sexual abuse. It is alleged that girls between the ages of 10 and 14 were drugged and violently raped. Police are holding five children in protective custody and fear that more victims will be discovered as they examine video and computer files. To read more about this and related subjects, please visit Bangkok Post by clicking here.

Israel has passed a new law that expands the definition of human trafficking to include people being trafficked into forced labour and organ trafficking. Previously Israeli legislation only covered the trafficking of women into sexual exploitation. Violation of the law will lead to a 16 year sentence, 20 years if a minor is involved.
Chairman of the Knesset Justice Committee, Menahem Ben-Sasson said “This is handling a problem that is one of the largest problems of crime and corruption in the world. In the law there is wording characteristic of the modern world, such as slave trafficking, coercive employment, and responsibility of the global village for the oppressed and the weak,”
People are often trafficked by recruitment agencies who charge large sums of money to bring workers into the country. They then take the workers’ documentation, requiring them to work to pay off the debt. This is a kind of debt slavery.
Israel is a destination for women, mainly from Ukraine, Moldova, Uzbekistan, Belarus, and Russia, who are trafficked into the sex trade. It is also a destination for migrant workers from China, Romania, Jordan, Turkey, Thailand, the Philippines, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and India who wish to work in the construction, agriculture and health care industries, but are in fact trafficked into working in conditions of slavery in those industries.
For more on this and related stories, please visit Ynet News click here.

A woman called Rukmini has been arrested at a railway station in New Delhi on suspicion of trafficking women into prostitution. The middle aged woman is from Latur, a city devastated in an earthquake in 1993, which has become a source city for women being trafficked into sexual exploitation. The woman was spotted at the railway by a former victim who had allegedly been sold into slavery by Rukmini eight years previously. Since being sold the victim had been rescued and was working with an NGO called Shakti Vahini despite suffering years of abuse and contracting HIV. Rukmini was caught allegedly trafficking another woman, who had a young daughter and son with her, into sexual exploitation and was overpowered by NGO workers and handed over to the police. To read more about this and related issues, please visit The Hindi by clicking here. 

According to a paper presented by University of Swaziland Lecturer Maxine Langwenya last week, child trafficking is widespread in the country and there is no law to prevent it. Many of the children are sold into South Africa as child prostitutes, or forced to work on farms, but others are sold as far away as India. Swaziland has not ratified the UN Palermo Protocol against human trafficking and needs to do much more to prevent this crime. Before this report, it was thought (in the US Trafficking in Persons report 2006), that a small number of children were being trafficked into exploitation from the country. Swaziland needs to enact clear anti-trafficking legislation, provide protection for victims and in particular for the country’s 70,000 AIDS orphans.
To read more on this and related issues, please visit The Swazi Observer, by clicking here.