Israel passes new anti-trafficking laws.

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.
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