The Council of Europe is planning to train Roma people to act as mediators, who will work closely with Roma families in Albania, Moldova and Slovakia in an attempt to prevent more Roma women and children being trafficked into forced prostitution, forced labour and forced begging. Often Roma are left outside of normal prevention schemes, being discriminated against and ostracised. As a result Roma are more vulnerable to being trafficked. Through funding from the Norwegian and Finnish governments, the first training will take place in Strasbourg at the start of November. To read more about this and related subjects, please visit noticias.info by clicking here.

State run media in Myanmar (Burma) has sentenced a woman to 12 years in jail for trafficking two women into forced prostitution. A court in the town of Tachileik had found Nang Aye Naw, 41, guilty of selling the women into prostitution in a border town in Malaysia, after luring them with false promises of work. There is a major problem of women from poor backgrounds in Myanmar being sold to brothels in Thailand and Malaysia. Despite this example of new anti-trafficking legislation in action, brought to light by the state media, Myanmar remains a country with one of the world’s worst records on human trafficking, including state sponsored forced labour. For more on this and related stories, please visit the International Herald Tribune by clicking here.

The Israeli parliament, the Knesset, has voted to broaden and strengthen the powers of the anti-trafficking legislation in the country. NGOs estimate that there are approximately 15,000 people in Israel who have been trafficked into forced labour and thousands who are trafficked into sexual exploitation. Although the government estimates are much lower, they recognise that there is a problem which needs addressing. Involvement with human trafficking could now result in 16-20 years in prison.
MK Zehava Gal-On who drafted the law said;
“We are talking about an innovative, revolutionary, and precedent-setting law which deals harshly with traffickers of people and body parts. The law will provide law enforcement officers better tools to combat the phenomenon,”
“We knew that if we didn’t act now the problem would only grow to the point where we could not longer hope to battle it.”
Challenges remain in the fight in Israel against human trafficking, including a lack of funds and also poor cross-border communication, essential to bringing traffickers to justice. For more on this and related issues, please visit the Jerusalem Post, by clicking here. To watch video about human trafficking in Israel, please click here.

Thirty-three people have been arrested for sex trafficking in the Spain’s Canary Isles. The arrests included fifteen Bulgarians, seven Spaniards and two Romanians. The traffickers allegedly lured young Bulgarian women to Spain with offers of high paid jobs. They were then forced into prostitution and their services advertised into the Spanish media. The alleged leader of the gang was a thirty-five year old Bulgarian known as Kiko. The prostitution services were offered as part of “an unforgettable tourist trip to the Canary Islands.” There is a strong link between Bulgarian organised crime and Spain. For more on this and related subjects, please visit the Sofia Echo by clicking here.

Speakers in a forum on human trafficking in Dhaka, Bangladesh said that numbers of women and children being trafficked to India into forced prostitution and forced labour are rising. During the period June 15^th 2004 to September 2006 488 victims were rescued, 379 alleged traffickers were arrested and 444 were given back to their legal guardian, the rest were cared for in shelters. These numbers are, of course, only the cases where the police were successful in detecting what was happening. The forum, organised by Association for Community Development said that women and children were being lured by the promised of false jobs and sold into situations of slavery every day and that it would take a united effort from all sectors of society to deal with this problem. For more on this and related issues, please visit The Daily Star of Bangladesh by clicking here.