Southeast Asia
Jul 31, 2009
Farmers forgotten in oil-for-food deals
By Brian McCartan
BANGKOK - Southeast Asian countries took big steps towards formalizing food-for-oil deals with Gulf states at a June meeting between the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC).
Proponents of the deals cite the benefits of more foreign investment for the region's often backward agricultural industries, but the lack of transparency surrounding the investments is raising concerns about their ultimate economic impact.
A meeting in Bahrain on June 30 was notably the first between ASEAN and GCC foreign ministers, signaling growing trade ties between the regions. ASEAN secretary general and former Thai foreign minister Surin Pitsuwan summed up the commercial outlook of those attending at a press conference following the gathering. "You have what we don't have, and we have plenty of what you don't have, so we need each other."
ASEAN is composed of Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. Growing population and economic pressures on land and water contributed to the 2007-2008 global food crisis, which saw prices spiral and already impoverished global populations go hungry. That prompted several food-producing nations to restrict exports of certain staples and caused governments everywhere to rethink their food security policies.
The food price scare, which has for now receded with falling commodity prices dragged down by the global economic crisis, has pushed many oil-rich and food-poor Gulf states to seek long-term lease rights to overseas farmlands.
Gulf states, which last year imported 80% of their staple foods at a cost of US$20 billion, have shown an increasing interest in Southeast Asian farmland. China, which in recent years has leased large tracts of regional land to grow rubber and crops for biofuels, is also seeking land to feed its rapidly urbanizing population. South Korea, with one of the world's highest population densities, and India, the second-most populous country, are both challenged by shrinking agricultural areas and are also in the hunt.
The deals brokered so far have been substantial. According to an October 2008 briefing paper by GRAIN, a Spain-based grassroots organization that promotes sustainable agriculture, Cambodia had at that time as much as US$3 billion in agriculture-related foreign investment under negotiation, apparently involving millions of hectares of land.
Agreements signed or under consideration included a $546 million loan from Kuwait for agricultural projects, a $200 million venture with Qatar, the lease of 1.6 million hectares to Saudi Arabia, a similar lease arrangement for 1.2 million hectares to China and another for 20,000 hectares to South Korea.
In the Philippines, Saudi Arabia announced it would allocate $238.6 million to establish fruit plantations and support aquaculture and halal food processing projects. Philippine President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo opened talks with Qatar in December to lease around 100,000 hectares of agricultural land.
Bahrain agreed in March to set up a $500 million joint agri-business venture and around 10,000 hectares have already been allocated to grow rice, corn, sugarcane, pineapple and various vegetables. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has been granted 3,000 hectares for agriculture projects. A South Korean company was granted a 25-year lease in April for 94,000 hectares of farmland on Mindoro Island for growing feed corn.
An additional 1.5 million hectares is to be made available to foreign and domestic investors for agricultural projects, the Philippine Department of Agriculture announced on May 7.
In Indonesia, China has paid for the rights to 1.24 million hectares of land. That lags only Saudi Arabia's agricultural investments, which encompass 1.6 million hectares across the country. A planned $4.3 billion investment in rice production on 500,000 hectares by the Bin Laden Group of Saudi Arabia was recently put on hold for undisclosed reasons.
Even political pariah and agricultural laggard Myanmar is in on the Gulf action. Chinese companies are investing in contract farming of rice for export in the country's northern regions. In September 2008, Myanmar's ruling generals signed a deal with New Delhi to produce pulses exclusively for export to India. Kuwaiti officials visited Myanmar in September last year to finalize an agreement to produce rice and palm oil on a contract farming basis.
Estimates of land leased to foreigners in Laos now runs as high as 15% of total viable agricultural land - although some non-governmental workers dispute that figure as excessively high. GRAIN's figures in 2009 indicate that China has leased some 70,000 hectares in Laos for food, rubber and biofuel crops. Kuwaiti firms were reported by the Vientiane Times earlier this year to be interested in investing in rice and agarwood production.
Thailand and Vietnam, the world's two leading rice exporters, have also cut Gulf state deals. A big Thai exporter signed a memorandum of understanding in 2008 with Bahrain to secure rice supplies for the next two years. Earlier this month, Thai ambassador Suphat Chitranukroh told the Bahrain-based Gulf Daily News that Bahrain had been selected as a hub for the distribution of Thai food across the Gulf, with plans to build a Thai food distribution center in the country.
Meanwhile, Vietnam agreed in September 2008 to establish a $1 billion investment fund in cooperation with Qatar, funds from which will be earmarked for investment in food production for export. Talks held with Saudi Arabia in June were aimed at exchanging food for energy supplies.
Capital-starved lands
Proponents of the deals say they could help capital-starved Southeast Asian countries faster develop their often backward agriculture industries and in the process bridge the yawning wealth gap between urban and rural areas. They say rural-focused investments will result in more jobs, better infrastructure and improvements in agricultural techniques and technology. Foreign funds could also provide much-needed capital for small farmers, particularly as they face funding difficulties amid the current global credit crunch.
Cambodia has said it hopes foreign investment will improve its average rice yields from 2.5 tonnes per hectare to levels comparable to neighboring Thailand's 3.5 tonnes. The government is also eager to increase rice exports, which lag due to quality control problems caused by a shortage of storage and milling facilities. The Philippines says it expects an agreement with Bahrain will create 20,000 new jobs on the impoverished and insurgency-prone southern island of Mindanao.
At the same time, activists and food-security experts express concerns about the lack of transparency surrounding deals cut between Southeast Asian governments and their Gulf area suitors. Details of land areas, locations, lengths of leases and amounts invested have been scant in government statements, and news reports on the deals often present contradictory information. That, they venture, could open the way for abuse and corruption.
Jacques Diouf, the head of the United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), warned in August that a new kind of "neo-colonialism" could emerge from land deals where poor Southeast Asian countries produce food for export to rich Gulf states at the expense of their own underfed people.
Figures for deals brokered between Cambodia, Kuwait and Qatar, which media reports indicate could involve hundreds of millions of dollars, have not been publicly disclosed. Despite a string of prime ministerial visits and the official announcement last year of a $546 million loan for an agricultural land-related deal between Cambodia and Kuwait, official statements have been devoid of exact financial details.
In Laos, there is widespread suspicion that government officials are lining their own pockets from foreign-invested land deals. Many rural Lao are known to be upset by the ease with which foreign firms have been able to buy rights to farmland long worked by their families. There has been no public debate about Lao land deals in the state-dominated media. At least one Lao businessman who protested against China-invested rubber plantations mysteriously disappeared in 2007.
Loose laws
Land rights throughout the region are largely customary rather than secured through legal title deeds. Land entitlement and reform has been slow in coming in most Southeast Asian nations. In many villages across the region, land ownership is recognized by agrarians and village headmen, but formal legal titles provided by the central government are seldom granted. In Vietnam and Myanmar, land is formally owned by the state with farmers holding only land-use rights.
Land ownership laws that do exist are often inadequate, with vague language and numerous loopholes that are frequently exploited by businessmen and corrupt politicians to justify land seizures. In other countries laws are simply ignored by local elites and corrupt government officials with links to influential agriculture corporations.
Numerous reports have detailed heavy-handed expropriation in Cambodia and the Thai press regularly carries stories of land scandals involving politicians, businessmen and high-ranking army and police officers. Land-grabbing in Cambodian rural areas is rampant, human-rights groups allege, despite a land law that limits economic concessions to less than 10,000 hectares. LICADHO, a Cambodia-based rights group, estimated in a May report that over 250,000 people in 13 provinces had been adversely affected by land-grabbing and forced evictions since 2003.
British-based rights group Amnesty International said last year that on top of those already evicted another 150,000 Cambodians across the country were at risk of forced relocation. The Cambodian government's recently brokered and opaque deal with Kuwait for farmland in Kampong Thom province has farmers concerned that their eviction may be part and parcel of the deal, according to rights activists.
In the Philippines, which has a history of farmer demands for land redistribution and agrarian reforms, an agreement with China to lease 1.4 million hectares of agricultural land worth an estimated $4 billion was suspended in 2007 after protests by local farmers' groups, politicians and the Roman Catholic Church. Fishing and agricultural groups last month came out in opposition to the government's recent deal with Bahrain, calling it "unlawful and immoral" at a time when millions of Filipinos are landless.
In Myanmar, the government often uses the legal justification that the state owns all lands to forcibly remove peasants from their land for development projects. Human rights groups have for years documented forced relocations of whole villages and the seizure of farmland for commercial agriculture projects linked to the ruling military junta. Refugees arriving in Thailand have claimed that they were forcibly removed from their land to make way for rubber plantations, including deals cut with Chinese companies.
In export-geared Thailand, agribusiness giant Charoen Pokphand Foods (CP) signed a deal on June 22 with the Bahrain-based Islamic Bank, al-Salam, to jointly invest in agricultural businesses. According to CP Group vice chairman Eam Ngamdamronk, "Investment in any project will be supplied by Bahrain, while the CP Group will provide knowledge and expertise to support them." The group is apparently looking at investment opportunities not only in Thailand but throughout the region.
What troubles activists is that land seized and committed to growing food for export may drive up prices in domestic markets and crowd out small farmers. Several regional countries, including Myanmar and Laos, receive food aid from the World Food Program (WFP) due to chronic agricultural production shortfalls.
Last year, Cambodia requested $35 million in food aid from the WFP at the same time as it was negotiating deals to lease large tracts of farmland to Kuwait and Qatar. The Cambodian Center for Study and Development in Agriculture said last October that as many as 100,000 Cambodian families suffered from insufficient food.
Food security experts, including the UN's special rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier de Schutter, have called for a "code of conduct" over land-lease deals to better protect host countries and local farmers. At an April 6 forum in New York, de Schutter said, "States all too often are led to make such deals because they are attracted to immediate rewards. But they should look at the long-term consequences."
The US-based International Food Policy Research Institute has similarly called for the creation of a code of conduct to govern commercial relations between foreign investors, whether corporate or governmental, and host countries which also protects the interests of small farmers and the environment.
In an April 2009 policy brief, the institute said that such a code of conduct should include transparency in negotiations, respect for existing land rights, shared benefits, environmental sustainability, adherence to national trade policies and strong enforcement mechanisms. Brian McCartan is a Bangkok-based freelance journalist. He may be reached at brianpm@comcast.net.
(Copyright 2009 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)
31 July, 2009
Minister Prepares for Border Discussions
By Chun Sakada, VOA Khmer
Original report from Phnom Penh
30 July 2009
Foreign Minister Hor Namhong on Thursday urged border committees from Cambodia and Thailand to find a resolution to the ongoing border dispute between the two neighbors.
Hor Namhong made his remarks ahead of a joint border committee meeting scheduled in Bangkok next week, where he will meet with his counterpart Kasit Phiromya.
Hor Namhong told reporters at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs he would push for a resolution to the crisis, which has claimed seven lives in military skirmishes over the past year, and would seek to have the disputed border demarcated.
Thai soldiers entered a disputed area in July 2008 near Preah Vihear temple, which had just been listed as a World Heritage site. The incursion sparked a massive build-up of troops on both sides, and several rounds of talks have failed to resolved the problem.
Var Kimhong, head of Cambodia’s border committee, said the Cambodia side will request from Thailand “a clear date” for the joint committees to find suitable places for border demarcation.
Cambodia and Thailand have approved more than 30 out of 73 sites where markers need to be placed along 805 kilometers of border, he said.
Original report from Phnom Penh
30 July 2009
Foreign Minister Hor Namhong on Thursday urged border committees from Cambodia and Thailand to find a resolution to the ongoing border dispute between the two neighbors.
Hor Namhong made his remarks ahead of a joint border committee meeting scheduled in Bangkok next week, where he will meet with his counterpart Kasit Phiromya.
Hor Namhong told reporters at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs he would push for a resolution to the crisis, which has claimed seven lives in military skirmishes over the past year, and would seek to have the disputed border demarcated.
Thai soldiers entered a disputed area in July 2008 near Preah Vihear temple, which had just been listed as a World Heritage site. The incursion sparked a massive build-up of troops on both sides, and several rounds of talks have failed to resolved the problem.
Var Kimhong, head of Cambodia’s border committee, said the Cambodia side will request from Thailand “a clear date” for the joint committees to find suitable places for border demarcation.
Cambodia and Thailand have approved more than 30 out of 73 sites where markers need to be placed along 805 kilometers of border, he said.
Cambodian FM to visit Thailand in early August on border issues
PHNOM PENH, July 30 (Xinhua) -- Cambodia and Thailand will have a meeting of multi-committee in Bangkok to push the measurement for border demarcation, a senior official said on Thursday.
"I will go to Thailand for the meeting of multi-committee on August 3 and 4," Hor Namhong, deputy prime minister and minister of foreign affairs and international cooperation told reporters after the signing ceremony of receiving over 33 million U.S. dollars grant aid from Japanese government at his ministry.
"I will require Thai side to continue discussion on the border issues and the Border Committee from both countries will meet soon to discuss on the measurement of the border to plant border posts," he added.
"The situation at areas near Preah Vihear temple is calm now, and Thai troops are deployed on there soil," Hor Namhong said. "There are no tension at the border, not like the media reported," he stressed.
At the same time, Hor also thanked Thai government cabinet for its approving on Tuesday to provide 41.2 million U.S. dollars for road improvement projects in Cambodia. The fund will be used to build Road 68 near border with Thailand, which will help facilitate the trade and tourism between the two countries, he noted.
Moreover, Cambodia and Thailand will open more border gates to push and facilitate the trade and tourism, he said.
Cambodia and Thailand share over 800 km-long borders. The troops from both sides have some confrontation since July 15, 2008, mainly near 11th century Preah Vihear temple.
"I will go to Thailand for the meeting of multi-committee on August 3 and 4," Hor Namhong, deputy prime minister and minister of foreign affairs and international cooperation told reporters after the signing ceremony of receiving over 33 million U.S. dollars grant aid from Japanese government at his ministry.
"I will require Thai side to continue discussion on the border issues and the Border Committee from both countries will meet soon to discuss on the measurement of the border to plant border posts," he added.
"The situation at areas near Preah Vihear temple is calm now, and Thai troops are deployed on there soil," Hor Namhong said. "There are no tension at the border, not like the media reported," he stressed.
At the same time, Hor also thanked Thai government cabinet for its approving on Tuesday to provide 41.2 million U.S. dollars for road improvement projects in Cambodia. The fund will be used to build Road 68 near border with Thailand, which will help facilitate the trade and tourism between the two countries, he noted.
Moreover, Cambodia and Thailand will open more border gates to push and facilitate the trade and tourism, he said.
Cambodia and Thailand share over 800 km-long borders. The troops from both sides have some confrontation since July 15, 2008, mainly near 11th century Preah Vihear temple.
30 July, 2009
The US growing interest in Southeast Asia
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Anak Agung Banyu Perwita
The Jakarta Post
Opinion
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton signed the ASEAN Treaty of Amity and Cooperation (TAC) last week. The formal establishment of this friendship treaty with the United States marks a new chapter in US-ASEAN relations.
Although relations between ASEAN and the US have no doubt been largely positive for both sides, the shift in US foreign policy regarding the region will no doubt impact future relations.
Even though many analysts have argued that Southeast Asia has enjoyed an environment of relative stability, it does not necessarily mean the region has been free from potential conflict. There are still many problems which have the potential to trigger an escalation of the complex pattern of relations among the members and non members of ASEAN. In other words, ASEAN should maintain its strategic opportunities by working well both internally and internationally.
In the wake of Sept. 11, 2001, the US found itself in a paradoxical position with Southeast Asia and, more specifically, with ASEAN. On the one hand, relations with several ASEAN member states have expanded significantly with the US-led global war against terrorism and because of a new appreciation in Washington of China’s rise in the region.
These two factors sparked a modest renaissance in US bilateral relations with ASEAN. Washington found new common cause with Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore and Manila in initiatives to strengthen anti-terrorism measures which included intelligence sharing, joint surveillance and police training.
However, critics make two arguments that detract from this claim. First, the global war against terrorism has created a backlash, particularly in Muslim areas of Southeast Asia, particularly in Indonesia.
Surveys suggest that the image of the United States in the region’s domestic populations has fallen significantly since the promulgation of the Bush doctrine and the beginning of the Iraq War. The post 9/11 era has diminished the power of state-centered political and military rivalry to dominate international relations.
On the other hand, many non-state actors now have a more significant global influence. There is also a process of reconfiguring power through which international security relationships are channeled.
A second argument holds that China has increased its political, economic, and security presence in Southeast Asia. US counter-terrorism policy has indirectly helped Beijing to deepen its engagement in smaller, poorer Southeast Asian countries where Islamic radicalism is not a major problem such as Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos.
The growing number of external powers seeking closer ties with Southeast Asia – Japan, Australia, India, Russia, the EU, as well as China – has led analysts on both sides of the Pacific to worry that the US presence in the region is diluted by default. A more specific concern is that a regional architecture is emerging which could weaken US power in the region, if not now then at some point in the future.
While there are no major problems that threaten the relations between ASEAN and the US in the near future, the lack of trust will lead to serious problem in the long term. Amid the rise of China as regional power, both ASEAN and the US have to make a greater effort to trust each other. They cannot take their common interests for granted. The common interests of containing communism during the Cold War and now in combating terrorism have no doubt brought the two parties together.
Secretary Clinton stated that a greater engagement with ASEAN is pivotal for the US. Further, US Ambassador to ASEAN Scot Marciel argued that the US also wants ASEAN “to remain strong and independent, enjoy peace, stability, ensure growing prosperity and greater freedom, achieve their goals for integration and [for the US] to work in partnership with ASEAN on bilateral, regional and global issues”.
Long lasting cooperation can only be built upon a more important foundation than simple interests. Trust and shared norms are essential if long lasting relationships are to be maintained. Unfortunately, so far, ASEAN-US relations have not reached a phase where trust and shared norms rule.
The writer is a Professor of International Relations at Parahyangan Catholic University and is Director of the Division of Global Affairs at the Indonesia Institute of Strategic Studies, Jakarta.
Anak Agung Banyu Perwita
The Jakarta Post
Opinion
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton signed the ASEAN Treaty of Amity and Cooperation (TAC) last week. The formal establishment of this friendship treaty with the United States marks a new chapter in US-ASEAN relations.
Although relations between ASEAN and the US have no doubt been largely positive for both sides, the shift in US foreign policy regarding the region will no doubt impact future relations.
Even though many analysts have argued that Southeast Asia has enjoyed an environment of relative stability, it does not necessarily mean the region has been free from potential conflict. There are still many problems which have the potential to trigger an escalation of the complex pattern of relations among the members and non members of ASEAN. In other words, ASEAN should maintain its strategic opportunities by working well both internally and internationally.
In the wake of Sept. 11, 2001, the US found itself in a paradoxical position with Southeast Asia and, more specifically, with ASEAN. On the one hand, relations with several ASEAN member states have expanded significantly with the US-led global war against terrorism and because of a new appreciation in Washington of China’s rise in the region.
These two factors sparked a modest renaissance in US bilateral relations with ASEAN. Washington found new common cause with Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore and Manila in initiatives to strengthen anti-terrorism measures which included intelligence sharing, joint surveillance and police training.
However, critics make two arguments that detract from this claim. First, the global war against terrorism has created a backlash, particularly in Muslim areas of Southeast Asia, particularly in Indonesia.
Surveys suggest that the image of the United States in the region’s domestic populations has fallen significantly since the promulgation of the Bush doctrine and the beginning of the Iraq War. The post 9/11 era has diminished the power of state-centered political and military rivalry to dominate international relations.
On the other hand, many non-state actors now have a more significant global influence. There is also a process of reconfiguring power through which international security relationships are channeled.
A second argument holds that China has increased its political, economic, and security presence in Southeast Asia. US counter-terrorism policy has indirectly helped Beijing to deepen its engagement in smaller, poorer Southeast Asian countries where Islamic radicalism is not a major problem such as Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos.
The growing number of external powers seeking closer ties with Southeast Asia – Japan, Australia, India, Russia, the EU, as well as China – has led analysts on both sides of the Pacific to worry that the US presence in the region is diluted by default. A more specific concern is that a regional architecture is emerging which could weaken US power in the region, if not now then at some point in the future.
While there are no major problems that threaten the relations between ASEAN and the US in the near future, the lack of trust will lead to serious problem in the long term. Amid the rise of China as regional power, both ASEAN and the US have to make a greater effort to trust each other. They cannot take their common interests for granted. The common interests of containing communism during the Cold War and now in combating terrorism have no doubt brought the two parties together.
Secretary Clinton stated that a greater engagement with ASEAN is pivotal for the US. Further, US Ambassador to ASEAN Scot Marciel argued that the US also wants ASEAN “to remain strong and independent, enjoy peace, stability, ensure growing prosperity and greater freedom, achieve their goals for integration and [for the US] to work in partnership with ASEAN on bilateral, regional and global issues”.
Long lasting cooperation can only be built upon a more important foundation than simple interests. Trust and shared norms are essential if long lasting relationships are to be maintained. Unfortunately, so far, ASEAN-US relations have not reached a phase where trust and shared norms rule.
The writer is a Professor of International Relations at Parahyangan Catholic University and is Director of the Division of Global Affairs at the Indonesia Institute of Strategic Studies, Jakarta.
PAD spokesman urged Thai govt to put up a fight against Cambodia's offshore petroleum claim
Sondhi calls on PM to sack Patcharawat
PM accused of being 'weak and immature'
30/07/2009
By MANOP THIP-OSOD AND THANIDA TANSUBHAPOL
Bangkok Post
Sondhi Limthongkul has taken Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva to task for failing to dismiss national police chief Patcharawat Wongsuwon.
Mr Sondhi's People's Alliance for Democracy blames Pol Gen Patcharawat for the slow progress in the investigation into the attempted murder of Mr Sondhi on April 17.
Mr Sondhi yesterday told reporters that if the police could not arrest a suspect in the attempted murder of a person of his profile, the nation might be in trouble.
He said Mr Abhisit and other people in important positions could also become assassination targets.
The PAD leader criticised Mr Abhisit for lacking the maturity of a leader by failing to remove Pol Gen Patcharawat as police chief.
If the prime minister decided not to transfer Pol Gen Patcharawat to strike a compromise with the military and political groups, the decision would probably backfire on his future, Mr Sondhi said.
"Mr Abhisit acts like a child who has no leadership at all," he said.
Mr Sondhi also questioned why Deputy Prime Minister Suthep Thaugsuban, who supervises national security, did not support the removal of Pol Gen Patcharawat.
He said Mr Suthep knew well that police had remained idle while red shirt demonstrators stormed the venue of the the Asean summit in Pattaya in April, forcing its postponement.
Mr Sondhi said the team assigned to kill him in Bangkok consisted of 13 officers from the special operations unit Task Force 90 in Lop Buri and one policeman.
The murder attempt was a collaboration between the military and the Department of Special Investigation, he alleged.
PAD coordinator Suriyasai Katasila said his group feared the Sondhi case was being deliberately delayed while scapegoats were being sought.
The alliance believed the investigation was being manipulated.
He said the PAD had hoped Mr Abhisit would help remove obstacles in the investigation.
But it could well turn out Mr Suthep himself was the obstacle, he said.
PAD spokesman Panthep Puapongpan yesterday also urged the government to put up a fight against Cambodia's attempt to claim petroleum deposits worth 4 trillion baht in the Gulf of Thailand near Koh Kud in Trat province.
He said Cambodia based its claim on a map attached to a joint communique signed by convicted prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra with Phnom Penh on June 19, 2001.
The PAD found that instead of the entire deposits belonging to Thailand, they have now become part of an overlapping territory which Cambodia could claim.
Foreign Minister Kasit Piromya yesterday defended Mr Suthep's role in the Thai-Cambodian Joint Technical Committee on Maritime.
He said Mr Suthep had what it takes to defend the national interest.
PM accused of being 'weak and immature'
30/07/2009
By MANOP THIP-OSOD AND THANIDA TANSUBHAPOL
Bangkok Post
Sondhi Limthongkul has taken Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva to task for failing to dismiss national police chief Patcharawat Wongsuwon.
Mr Sondhi's People's Alliance for Democracy blames Pol Gen Patcharawat for the slow progress in the investigation into the attempted murder of Mr Sondhi on April 17.
Mr Sondhi yesterday told reporters that if the police could not arrest a suspect in the attempted murder of a person of his profile, the nation might be in trouble.
He said Mr Abhisit and other people in important positions could also become assassination targets.
The PAD leader criticised Mr Abhisit for lacking the maturity of a leader by failing to remove Pol Gen Patcharawat as police chief.
If the prime minister decided not to transfer Pol Gen Patcharawat to strike a compromise with the military and political groups, the decision would probably backfire on his future, Mr Sondhi said.
"Mr Abhisit acts like a child who has no leadership at all," he said.
Mr Sondhi also questioned why Deputy Prime Minister Suthep Thaugsuban, who supervises national security, did not support the removal of Pol Gen Patcharawat.
He said Mr Suthep knew well that police had remained idle while red shirt demonstrators stormed the venue of the the Asean summit in Pattaya in April, forcing its postponement.
Mr Sondhi said the team assigned to kill him in Bangkok consisted of 13 officers from the special operations unit Task Force 90 in Lop Buri and one policeman.
The murder attempt was a collaboration between the military and the Department of Special Investigation, he alleged.
PAD coordinator Suriyasai Katasila said his group feared the Sondhi case was being deliberately delayed while scapegoats were being sought.
The alliance believed the investigation was being manipulated.
He said the PAD had hoped Mr Abhisit would help remove obstacles in the investigation.
But it could well turn out Mr Suthep himself was the obstacle, he said.
PAD spokesman Panthep Puapongpan yesterday also urged the government to put up a fight against Cambodia's attempt to claim petroleum deposits worth 4 trillion baht in the Gulf of Thailand near Koh Kud in Trat province.
He said Cambodia based its claim on a map attached to a joint communique signed by convicted prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra with Phnom Penh on June 19, 2001.
The PAD found that instead of the entire deposits belonging to Thailand, they have now become part of an overlapping territory which Cambodia could claim.
Foreign Minister Kasit Piromya yesterday defended Mr Suthep's role in the Thai-Cambodian Joint Technical Committee on Maritime.
He said Mr Suthep had what it takes to defend the national interest.
New Book Hammers Judicial System
By Ros Sothea, VOA Khmer
Original report from Phnom Penh
29 July 2009
Post-war Cambodia has failed to produce a strong, independent judiciary, but instead has produced a system where judges move cases around according to bribes and potential earning power, a new book concludes.
The book, “Beyond Democracy in Cambodia: Political Reconstruction in a Post-Conflict,” edited by two professors from Sweden’s Gothenburg University and written by a number of Cambodian and international researchers, launched Friday.
Its authors, Cambodian and international researchers both, found weaknesses in the courts and other sectors of Cambodia’s burgeoning democracy.
Specifically, researcher Un Kheang, who wrote a section of the book on the judicial system and democratization, found a court without the confidence of the people.
“If you ask people whether or not the regime is legitimate, the general answer is, ‘yes,’” Un Kheang said at the book’s launch in Phnom Penh Friday. “But if you ask people if the court is legitimate, if the court is independent, the overwhelming is, ‘no.’”
Major donors to Cambodia, including the US, France, Australia and Japan, have provided millions of dollars in aid to help Cambodia reform its rule of law, but the courts remain heavily criticized by independent monitors and the public.
Joakim Ojendal, a professor of peace and development research at Gothenburg, who edited the book with fellow professor Mona Lilja, told VOA Khmer in an interview Friday that when a judiciary is compromised, it impedes the deepening of democracy and hurts investment.
People lose their confidence in the legal system as well as other political institutions, he said.
Government officials say the book doesn’t accurately portray a system that is under reform.
“One has the right to write a book, but before we start writing, we have to do a deep survey with balance,” said Cheam Yeap, a CPP lawmaker. “If the book mentions all bad things about our management, it will affect what were are trying to seek in foreign investment.”
“Democracy in Cambodia” highlights a number of irregularities in the court system, at a time when the judicial system is under heavy scrutiny for political bias and favoritism.
“Very often judges manipulated those who came into contact with the judiciary to ensure the maximum bribe,” Un Kheang wrote. “On some occasions judges employed delaying tactics in their rulings in order to extract more bribe money from litigants.”
Low salaries made judges and other court officials “susceptible to compromise and bribery,” Un Kheang wrote. “Corrupt and incompetent judges are able to maintain their jobs because of the extensive corruption within the judicial system and the entrenched patron-client network. Meanwhile, appointments and promotions are based on patronage and bribery.”
This “widespread corruption” hurts the poor, who don’t have the money to pursue their cases, he wrote. “It also creates injustice for the poor when they face legal battles with the rich.”
The courts are also open to interference from the executive branch and powerful officials. Judges and prosecutors who go against the status quo can lose their jobs.
“Although there was no threat involved, we judges have to follow, because we know in advance the dimension of their power,” one judge told Un Kheang.
Un Kheang also found that in political cases, judges delivered verdicts that followed the guidelines of the government, led by the ruling Cambodian People’s Party.
As an example of the court system at work, Kheang Un pointed to the ongoing court battle between opposition lawmaker Mu Sochua, who sued the premier for allegedly derogatory remarks in the 2008 election campaign, and Prime Minister Hun Sen, who then countersued.
Mu Sochua’s case has been dropped, but a verdict in Hun Sen’s countersuit is expected Aug. 4.
“With the argument between the prime minister and Mu Sochua, you will see the role of judiciary in the country,” Un Kheang said Friday.
The researcher pointed to a shortage of resources hampering an independent court system.
“The judiciary faces a severe shortage of material resources and human resources, including judges, prosecutors and lawyers,” he wrote. “Lawyers are either fearful or inexperienced in challenging prosecutors or judges during trials. Cambodian lawyers are not competent, and they didn’t present solid evidence.”
Money from the budget was “significantly lower” than that for defense and security, the author found, “and usually arrived at the court late and irregularly.”
The findings in the book met with favorable review from Adhoc rights investigator Chan Saveth.
“This independent study is good and accurate, and I support it,” he said. “The Cambodian government has to accept it and make changes accordingly.”
Original report from Phnom Penh
29 July 2009
Post-war Cambodia has failed to produce a strong, independent judiciary, but instead has produced a system where judges move cases around according to bribes and potential earning power, a new book concludes.
The book, “Beyond Democracy in Cambodia: Political Reconstruction in a Post-Conflict,” edited by two professors from Sweden’s Gothenburg University and written by a number of Cambodian and international researchers, launched Friday.
Its authors, Cambodian and international researchers both, found weaknesses in the courts and other sectors of Cambodia’s burgeoning democracy.
Specifically, researcher Un Kheang, who wrote a section of the book on the judicial system and democratization, found a court without the confidence of the people.
“If you ask people whether or not the regime is legitimate, the general answer is, ‘yes,’” Un Kheang said at the book’s launch in Phnom Penh Friday. “But if you ask people if the court is legitimate, if the court is independent, the overwhelming is, ‘no.’”
Major donors to Cambodia, including the US, France, Australia and Japan, have provided millions of dollars in aid to help Cambodia reform its rule of law, but the courts remain heavily criticized by independent monitors and the public.
Joakim Ojendal, a professor of peace and development research at Gothenburg, who edited the book with fellow professor Mona Lilja, told VOA Khmer in an interview Friday that when a judiciary is compromised, it impedes the deepening of democracy and hurts investment.
People lose their confidence in the legal system as well as other political institutions, he said.
Government officials say the book doesn’t accurately portray a system that is under reform.
“One has the right to write a book, but before we start writing, we have to do a deep survey with balance,” said Cheam Yeap, a CPP lawmaker. “If the book mentions all bad things about our management, it will affect what were are trying to seek in foreign investment.”
“Democracy in Cambodia” highlights a number of irregularities in the court system, at a time when the judicial system is under heavy scrutiny for political bias and favoritism.
“Very often judges manipulated those who came into contact with the judiciary to ensure the maximum bribe,” Un Kheang wrote. “On some occasions judges employed delaying tactics in their rulings in order to extract more bribe money from litigants.”
Low salaries made judges and other court officials “susceptible to compromise and bribery,” Un Kheang wrote. “Corrupt and incompetent judges are able to maintain their jobs because of the extensive corruption within the judicial system and the entrenched patron-client network. Meanwhile, appointments and promotions are based on patronage and bribery.”
This “widespread corruption” hurts the poor, who don’t have the money to pursue their cases, he wrote. “It also creates injustice for the poor when they face legal battles with the rich.”
The courts are also open to interference from the executive branch and powerful officials. Judges and prosecutors who go against the status quo can lose their jobs.
“Although there was no threat involved, we judges have to follow, because we know in advance the dimension of their power,” one judge told Un Kheang.
Un Kheang also found that in political cases, judges delivered verdicts that followed the guidelines of the government, led by the ruling Cambodian People’s Party.
As an example of the court system at work, Kheang Un pointed to the ongoing court battle between opposition lawmaker Mu Sochua, who sued the premier for allegedly derogatory remarks in the 2008 election campaign, and Prime Minister Hun Sen, who then countersued.
Mu Sochua’s case has been dropped, but a verdict in Hun Sen’s countersuit is expected Aug. 4.
“With the argument between the prime minister and Mu Sochua, you will see the role of judiciary in the country,” Un Kheang said Friday.
The researcher pointed to a shortage of resources hampering an independent court system.
“The judiciary faces a severe shortage of material resources and human resources, including judges, prosecutors and lawyers,” he wrote. “Lawyers are either fearful or inexperienced in challenging prosecutors or judges during trials. Cambodian lawyers are not competent, and they didn’t present solid evidence.”
Money from the budget was “significantly lower” than that for defense and security, the author found, “and usually arrived at the court late and irregularly.”
The findings in the book met with favorable review from Adhoc rights investigator Chan Saveth.
“This independent study is good and accurate, and I support it,” he said. “The Cambodian government has to accept it and make changes accordingly.”
Cambodia: Heavy downpours devastate rice harvests in Preah Vihear
Wednesday, 29 July 2009 15:03 Khouth Sophak Chakrya
Official reports 520 hectares of rice seedlings lost in two-week period.
MORE than 500 hectares of rice seedlings in Preah Vihear province were devastated by flooding after two weeks of downpours in the region, local officials said Tuesday.
"Floods caused by rainfall starting two weeks ago destroyed about 70 percent of the rice seedlings on 520 hectares of land in Kulen district," said Yan Ran, chief of the Kulen district council.
He said daily rainstorms also damaged irrigation systems and destroyed more than 20 tonnes of rice seed in four of the district's six communes.
He said local authorities were planning relief for families that lost crops to the inclement weather.
"Currently, we are preparing about 20 tonnes of rice seed to provide to 350 families whose rice seedlings were destroyed by the floods," he said.
Kulen Choeung commune chief Chheng Chhoy said the heavy rainfall was just the latest misfortune to strike the region, which earlier this month experienced an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease that killed about 30 cows and buffaloes.
"During the 15 days of rainfall, about 3 hectares of my rice seedlings were destroyed by the flood," said Yun Non, 57, a villager in Kulen Choeung village who noted that two of his buffaloes had also died recently from foot-and-mouth disease.
Villager Suy Yau, 36, said his family and other villagers relied on rice cultivation to survive. He said they would dig up wild manioc tubers, as they did during shortages in 2005, to get them through the year.
King Krida, director of the provincial Department of Agriculture, said he had called on the relevant departments to provide rice seed and food to farmers in the flooded areas.
"We will provide the rice seedling so that they can plant again because it is not too late to plant rice paddies," he said.
But Chheng Chhoy said farmers will not have the chance to sow their rice paddies again because additional floods are expected in mid-August.
"This year some of the farmers in my commune will not have enough food because they won't be able to grow rice," he said.
Official reports 520 hectares of rice seedlings lost in two-week period.
MORE than 500 hectares of rice seedlings in Preah Vihear province were devastated by flooding after two weeks of downpours in the region, local officials said Tuesday.
"Floods caused by rainfall starting two weeks ago destroyed about 70 percent of the rice seedlings on 520 hectares of land in Kulen district," said Yan Ran, chief of the Kulen district council.
He said daily rainstorms also damaged irrigation systems and destroyed more than 20 tonnes of rice seed in four of the district's six communes.
He said local authorities were planning relief for families that lost crops to the inclement weather.
"Currently, we are preparing about 20 tonnes of rice seed to provide to 350 families whose rice seedlings were destroyed by the floods," he said.
Kulen Choeung commune chief Chheng Chhoy said the heavy rainfall was just the latest misfortune to strike the region, which earlier this month experienced an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease that killed about 30 cows and buffaloes.
"During the 15 days of rainfall, about 3 hectares of my rice seedlings were destroyed by the flood," said Yun Non, 57, a villager in Kulen Choeung village who noted that two of his buffaloes had also died recently from foot-and-mouth disease.
Villager Suy Yau, 36, said his family and other villagers relied on rice cultivation to survive. He said they would dig up wild manioc tubers, as they did during shortages in 2005, to get them through the year.
King Krida, director of the provincial Department of Agriculture, said he had called on the relevant departments to provide rice seed and food to farmers in the flooded areas.
"We will provide the rice seedling so that they can plant again because it is not too late to plant rice paddies," he said.
But Chheng Chhoy said farmers will not have the chance to sow their rice paddies again because additional floods are expected in mid-August.
"This year some of the farmers in my commune will not have enough food because they won't be able to grow rice," he said.
29 July, 2009
Preah Vihear: Tending their border garden
The Phnom Penh Post, Wednesday, 29 July 2009 15:03 Thet Sambath and Tracey Shelton
An RCAF battalion stationed along the front lines near Preah Vihear temple has taken to growing food to supplement what soldiers say are meagre rations.
Photo by: Tracey Shelton
A member of Royal Cambodian Armed Forces Battalion 404 stands in the soldiers’ corn field at their base near the Thai border in Ta Thav village, Choam Ksan district, Preah Vihear province.
Preah Vihear Province
OVER the past year, soldiers in one Royal Cambodian Armed Forces battalion stationed along the Thai-Cambodian border in Preah Vihear province have learned how to supplement what they describe as meagre rations provided by the government - by growing their own food.
Though they say the tension with Thailand is never far from their minds, troops belonging to RCAF Battalion 404 find time each day to tend livestock and cultivate vegetables on their base, located about 2 kilometers away from the disputed Preah Vihear temple complex.
They have raised two pigs, 49 cows, and more than 1,000 chickens at their base in Ta Thav, in Preah Vihear's Choam Ksan district. In addition, they have also grown a variety of different vegetables, including cucumbers, pumpkins, potatoes, cabbage and corn.
"We have rations from the government, but it's not enough," said Ten Navun, a first lieutenant in the battalion. "That's why we decided to make our base self-sufficient."
There are slightly fewer than 1,000 soldiers in Battalion 404, currently stationed about 100 metres from the border with Thailand. All members of the battalion are former Khmer Rouge soldiers, Ten Navun said.
Colonel Sem Yo, the commander of the battalion, said the soldiers' time with the Khmer Rouge, during which they were often isolated in the forest and forced to fend for themselves, had prepared them well for their current conditions.
"You know we are former Khmer Rouge soldiers, so we have been taught how to farm, how to plant vegetables, how to grow rice. This is what we have learned, and now we continue to practice it. We have our own crops, so we don't worry about running out of food," he said.
Though many of the soldiers have been stationed in the area for years, Ten Navun said they became particularly interested in establishing a farm there in just the past 12 months, as the conflict with Thailand over UNESCO's decision to accept Cambodia's application to list Preah Vihear temple as a World Heritage site became increasingly hostile and, at times, violent.
He said the soldiers were worried that Thai soldiers would attempt to disrupt their supply lines and cut off their rations completely.
"We are planning to raise more chickens, cows, pigs and crops to have enough supplies for everyone here. This is our strategy to defend the border," he said.
He estimated that the battalion could survive for two to three months on its current food supply.
Building a permanent base
Sem Yo said he believed the base in Ta Thav could become the main RCAF base in the area, adding that he had ordered the troops to expand the camp by constructing houses and meeting halls.
Already, the camp is starting to look more settled. On a recent Monday morning, soldiers were at work planting vegetables and building houses.
Others played volleyball or card games to pass the time.
The sole woman with the all-male battalion, Than Ry, the 27-year-old wife of one of the soldiers, said she was doing her best to provide a civilising influence over the soldiers.
"They always make fun of me because I'm the only woman here, but I am happy to stay here and chat with them every day, even though there is tension at the border," said Than Ry, adding that she had been tasked with cooking for the soldiers and helping with the vegetable garden as well.
"I am not afraid of fighting by Thai and Cambodian soldiers," she said. "If there is a clash, I will hide in a trench with my husband."
One challenge that remains for the soldiers is to maintain a constant supply of fresh water. They have constructed a well near the base after receiving funding from RCAF Deputy Commander-in-Chief Hing Bun Heang, who is also the bodyguard commander for Prime Minister Hun Sen.
But because their camp is on a hilltop, the water has proved difficult to pump.
Currently, soldiers fetch water from wells at the bottom of the hill and transport it on trucks or motorbikes for 1 kilometer along the road into their camp.
Up until last month, before the road was finished, the soldiers were forced to walk up the hill while carrying their water and rice.
Officials in Phnom Penh praised the soldiers' resourcefulness, but they rejected the notion that the government was not providing them with enough food.
"The ministry has provided them with enough rations and food, but our soldiers have farmed and planted vegetables because they want to eat delicious food," said Chum Sambath, undersecretary of state for the Ministry of Defence.
"They have been trained to support themselves," he added, calling the battalion's practices part of a "military strategy".
Sok Vandeth, deputy commander of Border Police Battalion 795, who is also stationed at Ta Thav, said his battalion also tends a vegetable garden. He said it would be "impossible" to rely solely on government rations.
"We have nothing to do here but plant things for our food," he said.
An RCAF battalion stationed along the front lines near Preah Vihear temple has taken to growing food to supplement what soldiers say are meagre rations.
Photo by: Tracey Shelton
A member of Royal Cambodian Armed Forces Battalion 404 stands in the soldiers’ corn field at their base near the Thai border in Ta Thav village, Choam Ksan district, Preah Vihear province.
Preah Vihear Province
OVER the past year, soldiers in one Royal Cambodian Armed Forces battalion stationed along the Thai-Cambodian border in Preah Vihear province have learned how to supplement what they describe as meagre rations provided by the government - by growing their own food.
Though they say the tension with Thailand is never far from their minds, troops belonging to RCAF Battalion 404 find time each day to tend livestock and cultivate vegetables on their base, located about 2 kilometers away from the disputed Preah Vihear temple complex.
They have raised two pigs, 49 cows, and more than 1,000 chickens at their base in Ta Thav, in Preah Vihear's Choam Ksan district. In addition, they have also grown a variety of different vegetables, including cucumbers, pumpkins, potatoes, cabbage and corn.
"We have rations from the government, but it's not enough," said Ten Navun, a first lieutenant in the battalion. "That's why we decided to make our base self-sufficient."
There are slightly fewer than 1,000 soldiers in Battalion 404, currently stationed about 100 metres from the border with Thailand. All members of the battalion are former Khmer Rouge soldiers, Ten Navun said.
Colonel Sem Yo, the commander of the battalion, said the soldiers' time with the Khmer Rouge, during which they were often isolated in the forest and forced to fend for themselves, had prepared them well for their current conditions.
"You know we are former Khmer Rouge soldiers, so we have been taught how to farm, how to plant vegetables, how to grow rice. This is what we have learned, and now we continue to practice it. We have our own crops, so we don't worry about running out of food," he said.
Though many of the soldiers have been stationed in the area for years, Ten Navun said they became particularly interested in establishing a farm there in just the past 12 months, as the conflict with Thailand over UNESCO's decision to accept Cambodia's application to list Preah Vihear temple as a World Heritage site became increasingly hostile and, at times, violent.
He said the soldiers were worried that Thai soldiers would attempt to disrupt their supply lines and cut off their rations completely.
"We are planning to raise more chickens, cows, pigs and crops to have enough supplies for everyone here. This is our strategy to defend the border," he said.
He estimated that the battalion could survive for two to three months on its current food supply.
Building a permanent base
Sem Yo said he believed the base in Ta Thav could become the main RCAF base in the area, adding that he had ordered the troops to expand the camp by constructing houses and meeting halls.
Already, the camp is starting to look more settled. On a recent Monday morning, soldiers were at work planting vegetables and building houses.
Others played volleyball or card games to pass the time.
The sole woman with the all-male battalion, Than Ry, the 27-year-old wife of one of the soldiers, said she was doing her best to provide a civilising influence over the soldiers.
"They always make fun of me because I'm the only woman here, but I am happy to stay here and chat with them every day, even though there is tension at the border," said Than Ry, adding that she had been tasked with cooking for the soldiers and helping with the vegetable garden as well.
"I am not afraid of fighting by Thai and Cambodian soldiers," she said. "If there is a clash, I will hide in a trench with my husband."
One challenge that remains for the soldiers is to maintain a constant supply of fresh water. They have constructed a well near the base after receiving funding from RCAF Deputy Commander-in-Chief Hing Bun Heang, who is also the bodyguard commander for Prime Minister Hun Sen.
But because their camp is on a hilltop, the water has proved difficult to pump.
Currently, soldiers fetch water from wells at the bottom of the hill and transport it on trucks or motorbikes for 1 kilometer along the road into their camp.
Up until last month, before the road was finished, the soldiers were forced to walk up the hill while carrying their water and rice.
Officials in Phnom Penh praised the soldiers' resourcefulness, but they rejected the notion that the government was not providing them with enough food.
"The ministry has provided them with enough rations and food, but our soldiers have farmed and planted vegetables because they want to eat delicious food," said Chum Sambath, undersecretary of state for the Ministry of Defence.
"They have been trained to support themselves," he added, calling the battalion's practices part of a "military strategy".
Sok Vandeth, deputy commander of Border Police Battalion 795, who is also stationed at Ta Thav, said his battalion also tends a vegetable garden. He said it would be "impossible" to rely solely on government rations.
"We have nothing to do here but plant things for our food," he said.
Preah Vihear market construction begins
The Phnom Penh Post, Wednesday, 29 July 2009 15:03 Thet Sambath
CAMBODIAN soldiers in Preah Vihear province are taking the first steps towards rebuilding a market near Preah Vihear temple that was destroyed by Thai rocket fire in April.
Cut timber is currently being brought to Preah Vihear temple in pickup trucks, officials said.
Because the roads are poor, soldiers have needed to carry the timber partway to the site where the new market will soon be assembled.
"Everything is cut before it is sent to the construction site," said Hang Soth, general director of the Preah Vihear National Authority. "We will just raise the timber, connect them together and it's fixed."
Prime Minister Hun Sen earlier this month said the market should have been completed by July 19, though Hang Soth said at the time that that deadline was unrealistic.
Due to inclement weather, authorities did not want to predict when the market would be completed.
"I don't know when it will be finished because now it is the rainy season," said Sor Thavy, the deputy governor of Preah Vihear province.
Ros Heng, deputy governor of Preah Vihear's Choam Ksan district, said the market could bolster tourism when the border dispute with Thailand calms down.
"The market will serve all tourists," he said.
Hang Soth said the market would be constructed with wood, zinc and thatch, and that its style would be in keeping with that of Preah Vihear temple itself.
CAMBODIAN soldiers in Preah Vihear province are taking the first steps towards rebuilding a market near Preah Vihear temple that was destroyed by Thai rocket fire in April.
Cut timber is currently being brought to Preah Vihear temple in pickup trucks, officials said.
Because the roads are poor, soldiers have needed to carry the timber partway to the site where the new market will soon be assembled.
"Everything is cut before it is sent to the construction site," said Hang Soth, general director of the Preah Vihear National Authority. "We will just raise the timber, connect them together and it's fixed."
Prime Minister Hun Sen earlier this month said the market should have been completed by July 19, though Hang Soth said at the time that that deadline was unrealistic.
Due to inclement weather, authorities did not want to predict when the market would be completed.
"I don't know when it will be finished because now it is the rainy season," said Sor Thavy, the deputy governor of Preah Vihear province.
Ros Heng, deputy governor of Preah Vihear's Choam Ksan district, said the market could bolster tourism when the border dispute with Thailand calms down.
"The market will serve all tourists," he said.
Hang Soth said the market would be constructed with wood, zinc and thatch, and that its style would be in keeping with that of Preah Vihear temple itself.
Ministry of Defense spokesman rejects tense situation in the confrontation in Veal Entry and Phnom Trop
Ki Media
28 July 2009
By Sopheap
Khmer Sthabna
Translated from Khmer by Socheata
A report from an army official indicated that the situation along the Cambodian-Thai border is remaining still, however, both troops are constantly on alert in case an incident would occur.
The same source indicated that Thailand dug trenches, sent in armaments, tanks, troops and heavy artillery and posted them in the region located in front of Veal Entry (Eagle Field) and Phnom Trop hill on 28 July 2009, in the area where past armed clashes took place. However, the trenches are dug inside the Thai territory, only that these trenches are located right in front of Veal Entry and Phnom Trop zones.
The same source indicated that when Cambodian troops saw Thailand brought in tanks, armaments and troops and placed them in front of Veal Entry and Phnom trop, they have increased their vigilance in order to defend Cambodia’s territorial integrity.
The army official source claimed that the situation along the border is normal, and there is no tension.
Chhum Socheat, spokesman for the Cambodian ministry of Defense, confirmed that he is currently in Preah Vihear province and there is no tension, the situation is not tense and there is no problem. He also said that he walked along the border and nothing happened.
Chhum Socheat rejected the fact that there is tension along the border, and he said that Thailand dug trenches inside its own territory, and Cambodia is not concerned about it, there is no tension.
28 July 2009
By Sopheap
Khmer Sthabna
Translated from Khmer by Socheata
A report from an army official indicated that the situation along the Cambodian-Thai border is remaining still, however, both troops are constantly on alert in case an incident would occur.
The same source indicated that Thailand dug trenches, sent in armaments, tanks, troops and heavy artillery and posted them in the region located in front of Veal Entry (Eagle Field) and Phnom Trop hill on 28 July 2009, in the area where past armed clashes took place. However, the trenches are dug inside the Thai territory, only that these trenches are located right in front of Veal Entry and Phnom Trop zones.
The same source indicated that when Cambodian troops saw Thailand brought in tanks, armaments and troops and placed them in front of Veal Entry and Phnom trop, they have increased their vigilance in order to defend Cambodia’s territorial integrity.
The army official source claimed that the situation along the border is normal, and there is no tension.
Chhum Socheat, spokesman for the Cambodian ministry of Defense, confirmed that he is currently in Preah Vihear province and there is no tension, the situation is not tense and there is no problem. He also said that he walked along the border and nothing happened.
Chhum Socheat rejected the fact that there is tension along the border, and he said that Thailand dug trenches inside its own territory, and Cambodia is not concerned about it, there is no tension.
A Humane Trade Reform
By Michael Gerson
Friday, July 24, 2009
There was a time when international trade was the subject of poetry. In "Locksley Hall," Alfred Tennyson "[s]aw the heavens filled with commerce, argosies of magic sails/Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales."
Recently, however, trade has inspired more resentment than verse. During a recession, the threat of foreign competition can seem more real and present than the opportunities of foreign markets. According to the World Trade Organization, 30 countries have imposed trade-restricting measures since the onset of the economic crisis. China included a "Buy Chinese" provision in its stimulus package. The U.S. Congress has variously threatened to impose tariffs as an instrument of climate policy, limited bailed-out banks in hiring foreign workers and encouraged states receiving stimulus funds to "Buy American."
All this is politically understandable -- and economically insane. With the world experiencing the largest drop in trade volumes since World War II, actions that restrict global trade will delay global recovery. Protectionism is economically self-destructive: Won't American companies eventually want to compete for contracts in India and China? Protectionism is diplomatically self-defeating: Do we really want to pick trade fights with our closest friends, such as Canada and Mexico? Protectionism is outdated: The distinction between foreign and domestic companies is blurred when many use transnational supply chains. And protectionism is unjust: The world's poorest countries are often the most dependent on exports.
Fortunately, after a fling with union-pleasing protectionism during his campaign, President Obama has largely adopted the pro-trade consensus of his predecessors. He has signaled support for bilateral trade agreements with South Korea and Panama, and openness to a pact with Colombia. At the recent Group of Eight meeting in Italy, he joined other leaders in calling for the conclusion of a global trade deal in 2010 to comprehensively reduce tariffs and quotas.
Unfortunately, grand goals are the cynical staple of summits. Completing the global trade negotiations begun in Doha in 2001 will require developing countries such as China and India to open their manufacturing and service sectors, and the United States and Europe to dramatically reduce agricultural subsidies and barriers. And it will require Obama not merely to acknowledge the need for trade but also to press the arguments for trade on Capitol Hill and within his party.
All of this is unlikely (though not impossible). But even in the absence of a global trade agreement, America has a responsibility to fix its tariff system -- a system that often punishes the poor.
Current law is supposed to allow developing nations to export duty-free into U.S. markets. In practice, however, restrictions and limits are placed on imported clothing, textiles, footwear and agricultural products -- which are exactly the kind of labor-intensive products that many poor nations produce best. So American tariffs effectively single out the poorest nations for the highest international taxes. On average, these countries pay more than three times the tariff rates of our richest trading partners.
One example: According to the Center for Global Development, Cambodia and Bangladesh pay about the same total tariffs to America as do France and Britain -- even though those European countries export about 15 times more to the United States. And in 2006, America collected about $850 million in tariffs from Cambodia and Bangladesh, mainly on imported apparel -- which is about seven times more than we provided in foreign assistance to those impoverished countries.
How to change the system? Kimberly Ann Elliott, a senior fellow at the center, recommends that Congress provide 100 percent duty-free, quota-free access to American markets for 70 of the most vulnerable countries on Earth -- ending the discrimination against products produced by the world's poor.
There are good humanitarian reasons for this reform, which would help nations suffering from a global recession they did nothing to cause. There are national security justifications: America has a direct interest in promoting economic growth and stability in parts of the world otherwise prone to terrorism, criminal gangs and epidemic diseases.
And there is a domestic economic argument. The very products produced by the poor abroad -- clothing, shoes, food -- are necessities for the poor at home. Our current tariff system is a regressive tax on these goods.
The cost of this reform to American manufacturers would be minimal -- even under Elliott's proposal, less than 2 percent of American imports would come from the countries granted duty-free, quota-free access. But the effect in those nations could be large. Even if international trade is no longer cause for poetry, it is cause for hope.
mgerson@globalengage.org
Friday, July 24, 2009
There was a time when international trade was the subject of poetry. In "Locksley Hall," Alfred Tennyson "[s]aw the heavens filled with commerce, argosies of magic sails/Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales."
Recently, however, trade has inspired more resentment than verse. During a recession, the threat of foreign competition can seem more real and present than the opportunities of foreign markets. According to the World Trade Organization, 30 countries have imposed trade-restricting measures since the onset of the economic crisis. China included a "Buy Chinese" provision in its stimulus package. The U.S. Congress has variously threatened to impose tariffs as an instrument of climate policy, limited bailed-out banks in hiring foreign workers and encouraged states receiving stimulus funds to "Buy American."
All this is politically understandable -- and economically insane. With the world experiencing the largest drop in trade volumes since World War II, actions that restrict global trade will delay global recovery. Protectionism is economically self-destructive: Won't American companies eventually want to compete for contracts in India and China? Protectionism is diplomatically self-defeating: Do we really want to pick trade fights with our closest friends, such as Canada and Mexico? Protectionism is outdated: The distinction between foreign and domestic companies is blurred when many use transnational supply chains. And protectionism is unjust: The world's poorest countries are often the most dependent on exports.
Fortunately, after a fling with union-pleasing protectionism during his campaign, President Obama has largely adopted the pro-trade consensus of his predecessors. He has signaled support for bilateral trade agreements with South Korea and Panama, and openness to a pact with Colombia. At the recent Group of Eight meeting in Italy, he joined other leaders in calling for the conclusion of a global trade deal in 2010 to comprehensively reduce tariffs and quotas.
Unfortunately, grand goals are the cynical staple of summits. Completing the global trade negotiations begun in Doha in 2001 will require developing countries such as China and India to open their manufacturing and service sectors, and the United States and Europe to dramatically reduce agricultural subsidies and barriers. And it will require Obama not merely to acknowledge the need for trade but also to press the arguments for trade on Capitol Hill and within his party.
All of this is unlikely (though not impossible). But even in the absence of a global trade agreement, America has a responsibility to fix its tariff system -- a system that often punishes the poor.
Current law is supposed to allow developing nations to export duty-free into U.S. markets. In practice, however, restrictions and limits are placed on imported clothing, textiles, footwear and agricultural products -- which are exactly the kind of labor-intensive products that many poor nations produce best. So American tariffs effectively single out the poorest nations for the highest international taxes. On average, these countries pay more than three times the tariff rates of our richest trading partners.
One example: According to the Center for Global Development, Cambodia and Bangladesh pay about the same total tariffs to America as do France and Britain -- even though those European countries export about 15 times more to the United States. And in 2006, America collected about $850 million in tariffs from Cambodia and Bangladesh, mainly on imported apparel -- which is about seven times more than we provided in foreign assistance to those impoverished countries.
How to change the system? Kimberly Ann Elliott, a senior fellow at the center, recommends that Congress provide 100 percent duty-free, quota-free access to American markets for 70 of the most vulnerable countries on Earth -- ending the discrimination against products produced by the world's poor.
There are good humanitarian reasons for this reform, which would help nations suffering from a global recession they did nothing to cause. There are national security justifications: America has a direct interest in promoting economic growth and stability in parts of the world otherwise prone to terrorism, criminal gangs and epidemic diseases.
And there is a domestic economic argument. The very products produced by the poor abroad -- clothing, shoes, food -- are necessities for the poor at home. Our current tariff system is a regressive tax on these goods.
The cost of this reform to American manufacturers would be minimal -- even under Elliott's proposal, less than 2 percent of American imports would come from the countries granted duty-free, quota-free access. But the effect in those nations could be large. Even if international trade is no longer cause for poetry, it is cause for hope.
mgerson@globalengage.org
Labour Ministry agrees new regulations for guest workers
The Jordan Times
Wednesday, July 29th, 2009, 9:29 am Amman Time
By Hani Hazaimeh
AMMAN - The Labour Ministry on Tuesday finalised amendments to regulations governing the recruitment of expatriate workers, a measure expected to facilitate the hiring of foreign workers and streamline the sector.
"The amendments will be sent to the Cabinet for endorsement today [Tuesday] and will be put into effect after they are published in the Official Gazette," Labour Minister Ghazi Shbeikat said yesterday at a press conference.
Under the new regulations, expected to come into force next month, the bank guarantee required of employers who seek to recruit non-Jordanian workers will be cut by half, which will offset an increase in work permit fees.
Shbeikat stressed that the increase in work permit fees was aimed at protecting Jordanian workers and was decided in consultation with all parties concerned with the labour sector, adding that the revenues, generated from around 300,000 work permits the ministry issues or renews, will be used to support the recruitment of unemployed Jordanians.
Shbeikat noted that the new regulations came after the government agreed to raise work permit fees by JD70 for guest workers in all sectors except for the agriculture sector, in which fees will be raised by JD40.
The minister added that the fee raise is “insignificant” and will not affect the industrial sector, adding that the cost of guest worker recruitment does not exceed 15 per cent of total production costs.
Meanwhile, Shbeikat said that as of Thursday, the ministry will temporarily suspend its inspection campaign, which started last year, until the new regulations are in place, adding that guest workers in the Kingdom who are violating the Labour Law will be given a one-month grace period to rectify their legal situations.
The minister said the grace period will spare around 9,500 non-Jordanian workers who are working in the Kingdom without permits or whose work permits have expired. The decision includes Egyptian and Syrian workers and excludes those who came into the Kingdom on a tourist visa or to visit a relative.
Moreover, under the new regulations, workers employed in the construction and agriculture sectors will be able to change their workplace within the same sector, provided that they inform the ministry of the name of their new employer in order to update the ministry's database.
Starting August 1, the ministry will provide a one-stop-shop service for employers in order to facilitate their businesses, through which the recruitment of guest workers and the issuance and renewal of work permits will be done in one place.
As part of the measures aimed at protecting workers' financial rights, the minister said the new regulations will give the labour minister the authority to liquidate bank guarantees if an employer fails to fulfil financial obligations towards his employees, a measure that formerly required court approval.
Meanwhile, Shbeikat said the ministry is reconsidering an article in the Labour Law under which women are banned from working after 8:00pm, noting that some employers, such as malls and megastores, work late-night hours.
29 July 2009
Wednesday, July 29th, 2009, 9:29 am Amman Time
By Hani Hazaimeh
AMMAN - The Labour Ministry on Tuesday finalised amendments to regulations governing the recruitment of expatriate workers, a measure expected to facilitate the hiring of foreign workers and streamline the sector.
"The amendments will be sent to the Cabinet for endorsement today [Tuesday] and will be put into effect after they are published in the Official Gazette," Labour Minister Ghazi Shbeikat said yesterday at a press conference.
Under the new regulations, expected to come into force next month, the bank guarantee required of employers who seek to recruit non-Jordanian workers will be cut by half, which will offset an increase in work permit fees.
Shbeikat stressed that the increase in work permit fees was aimed at protecting Jordanian workers and was decided in consultation with all parties concerned with the labour sector, adding that the revenues, generated from around 300,000 work permits the ministry issues or renews, will be used to support the recruitment of unemployed Jordanians.
Shbeikat noted that the new regulations came after the government agreed to raise work permit fees by JD70 for guest workers in all sectors except for the agriculture sector, in which fees will be raised by JD40.
The minister added that the fee raise is “insignificant” and will not affect the industrial sector, adding that the cost of guest worker recruitment does not exceed 15 per cent of total production costs.
Meanwhile, Shbeikat said that as of Thursday, the ministry will temporarily suspend its inspection campaign, which started last year, until the new regulations are in place, adding that guest workers in the Kingdom who are violating the Labour Law will be given a one-month grace period to rectify their legal situations.
The minister said the grace period will spare around 9,500 non-Jordanian workers who are working in the Kingdom without permits or whose work permits have expired. The decision includes Egyptian and Syrian workers and excludes those who came into the Kingdom on a tourist visa or to visit a relative.
Moreover, under the new regulations, workers employed in the construction and agriculture sectors will be able to change their workplace within the same sector, provided that they inform the ministry of the name of their new employer in order to update the ministry's database.
Starting August 1, the ministry will provide a one-stop-shop service for employers in order to facilitate their businesses, through which the recruitment of guest workers and the issuance and renewal of work permits will be done in one place.
As part of the measures aimed at protecting workers' financial rights, the minister said the new regulations will give the labour minister the authority to liquidate bank guarantees if an employer fails to fulfil financial obligations towards his employees, a measure that formerly required court approval.
Meanwhile, Shbeikat said the ministry is reconsidering an article in the Labour Law under which women are banned from working after 8:00pm, noting that some employers, such as malls and megastores, work late-night hours.
29 July 2009
The U.N. in Cambodia
The New York Time
Published: July 28, 2009
To the Editor:
Re “Too Late for Revenge,” by Marshall Kim (Op-Ed, July 16), about Khmer Rouge trials and the role of the United Nations in Cambodia:
The trials are occurring 30 years after the end of the Pol Pot regime because United Nations member states continued for more than a decade to recognize the Khmer Rouge as Cambodia’s government and allowed them to occupy the country’s United Nations seat. The victims of the genocide were held hostage by cold-war politics, for which the world should feel enduring shame.
The trials do not constitute the entire mandate of the United Nations system in Cambodia. My own organization, Unicef, returned to Cambodia in 1979, just after the fall of Pol Pot’s regime. It devotes some $20 million a year to reduce maternal and child mortality, assure basic education and protect vulnerable children from the exploitation and abuse that are manifestations of continuing poverty.
Richard Bridle
Representative, Unicef
Phnom Penh, Cambodia, July 21, 2009
Published: July 28, 2009
To the Editor:
Re “Too Late for Revenge,” by Marshall Kim (Op-Ed, July 16), about Khmer Rouge trials and the role of the United Nations in Cambodia:
The trials are occurring 30 years after the end of the Pol Pot regime because United Nations member states continued for more than a decade to recognize the Khmer Rouge as Cambodia’s government and allowed them to occupy the country’s United Nations seat. The victims of the genocide were held hostage by cold-war politics, for which the world should feel enduring shame.
The trials do not constitute the entire mandate of the United Nations system in Cambodia. My own organization, Unicef, returned to Cambodia in 1979, just after the fall of Pol Pot’s regime. It devotes some $20 million a year to reduce maternal and child mortality, assure basic education and protect vulnerable children from the exploitation and abuse that are manifestations of continuing poverty.
Richard Bridle
Representative, Unicef
Phnom Penh, Cambodia, July 21, 2009
Rash of lawsuits sees Cambodia crack down on dissenters
The Financial Times
By Tim Johnston in Bangkok
Published: July 27 2009 03:00 Last updated: July 27 2009 03:00
Asia is no stranger to governments using the courts to muzzle their detractors, but the Cambodian government's current legal attack on its opponents is causing concern in the region.
Hang Chakra, former editor of the Khmer Machas Srok newspaper, is sharing a cell with 50 other convicts in Phnom Penh's notorious Prey Sar prison, serving a one-year sentence for articles that alleged corruption among government officials.
Moeung Sonn, head of the Khmer Cultural Civilisation Foundation, was last month sentenced to two years in jail in absentia for "disinformation" after suggesting that a new lighting system at the Angkor Wat temple complex might damage the 600-year-old buildings.
And on Friday, a court is to hand down its verdict in a case against Mu Sochua, an opposition parliamentarian accused of defamation against Hun Sen, Cambodia's prime minister.
"I'm sure I will be found guilty unless there is some magic in the air, and I don't feel that there is," she said yesterday.
"The Cambodian government is imposing its most serious crackdown on freedom of expression in recent years," Brad Adams, Asia director for Human Rights Watch, said last week.
The case against Mu Sochua, a former minister for women and veteran's affairs, is based on her allegation that Hun Sen called her "strong leg" - a cutting insult in Khmer culture - in a speech in her constituency in early April. When he declined to apologise, she called a press conference in which she alleged that not just herself, but all Cambodian women had been insulted.
That allegation provoked a counter-suit from Hun Sen. The courts threw out her case but agreed to hear Hun Sen's complaint.
Her lawyer withdrew after he came under pressure, provoking a protest from the office of the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. Mu Sochua declined to find a different attorney. "I am not going to put another lawyer through that torture," she said.
If she is found guilty, she will face a fine of about $2,500 (€1,760, £1,520). More importantly, she could lose the right to sit in parliament. Some analysts say that might be Hun Sen's intention.
"The concept of pluralism hasn't got any roots in Cambodia," said David Chandler, a professor of history at Monash University in Australia. "The opposition is almost by definition disloyal."
Son Chhay, another outspoken opposition parliamentarian, says the recent crackdown is a symptom of a government that is trying to address the issues facing the country, such as corruption, land seizures and economic stagnation.
"Like many dictatorial regimes in the region, because they are unable to solve the problems, they resort to measures to control the people and shut them up," he said.
"If he allowed Mu Sochua to challenge him, other people might go down the same path," said Son Chhay.
In the early 1990s, the international community invested some $1.5bn in a UN operation to restore civil government to a country that Hun Sen, a former Khmer Rouge cadre, had run since 1985.
The opposition fears the prime minister is using his parliamentary majority - the CPP won 90 of the 123 seats in parliament in elections last year - to destroy fragile institutions that have taken years to build.
By Tim Johnston in Bangkok
Published: July 27 2009 03:00 Last updated: July 27 2009 03:00
Asia is no stranger to governments using the courts to muzzle their detractors, but the Cambodian government's current legal attack on its opponents is causing concern in the region.
Hang Chakra, former editor of the Khmer Machas Srok newspaper, is sharing a cell with 50 other convicts in Phnom Penh's notorious Prey Sar prison, serving a one-year sentence for articles that alleged corruption among government officials.
Moeung Sonn, head of the Khmer Cultural Civilisation Foundation, was last month sentenced to two years in jail in absentia for "disinformation" after suggesting that a new lighting system at the Angkor Wat temple complex might damage the 600-year-old buildings.
And on Friday, a court is to hand down its verdict in a case against Mu Sochua, an opposition parliamentarian accused of defamation against Hun Sen, Cambodia's prime minister.
"I'm sure I will be found guilty unless there is some magic in the air, and I don't feel that there is," she said yesterday.
"The Cambodian government is imposing its most serious crackdown on freedom of expression in recent years," Brad Adams, Asia director for Human Rights Watch, said last week.
The case against Mu Sochua, a former minister for women and veteran's affairs, is based on her allegation that Hun Sen called her "strong leg" - a cutting insult in Khmer culture - in a speech in her constituency in early April. When he declined to apologise, she called a press conference in which she alleged that not just herself, but all Cambodian women had been insulted.
That allegation provoked a counter-suit from Hun Sen. The courts threw out her case but agreed to hear Hun Sen's complaint.
Her lawyer withdrew after he came under pressure, provoking a protest from the office of the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. Mu Sochua declined to find a different attorney. "I am not going to put another lawyer through that torture," she said.
If she is found guilty, she will face a fine of about $2,500 (€1,760, £1,520). More importantly, she could lose the right to sit in parliament. Some analysts say that might be Hun Sen's intention.
"The concept of pluralism hasn't got any roots in Cambodia," said David Chandler, a professor of history at Monash University in Australia. "The opposition is almost by definition disloyal."
Son Chhay, another outspoken opposition parliamentarian, says the recent crackdown is a symptom of a government that is trying to address the issues facing the country, such as corruption, land seizures and economic stagnation.
"Like many dictatorial regimes in the region, because they are unable to solve the problems, they resort to measures to control the people and shut them up," he said.
"If he allowed Mu Sochua to challenge him, other people might go down the same path," said Son Chhay.
In the early 1990s, the international community invested some $1.5bn in a UN operation to restore civil government to a country that Hun Sen, a former Khmer Rouge cadre, had run since 1985.
The opposition fears the prime minister is using his parliamentary majority - the CPP won 90 of the 123 seats in parliament in elections last year - to destroy fragile institutions that have taken years to build.
28 July, 2009
Property Rights for the Urban Poor in Cambodia
Source: The WIP, www.thewip.net
July 27, 2009
by ChristineRobinson
It was two in the morning when we first heard the loudspeakers. My friend was annoyed thinking the noise was coming from people partying late, but we later learned something very different was happening. I got up early that morning to eat breakfast before a long day at the Killing Fields and Tuol Sleng. Walking downstairs, I saw about a hundred people outside our hotel in Phnom Penh including press, local police, and the Cambodian military.
I rushed outside and found a member of my group. He explained that the slum down the street, Dey Krahorn, was being forcefully evacuated by the military and police. A barrier kept us from getting too close, and a green fence had been put up along the perimeter. We saw trucks coming out of the slum carrying what I thought was junk, but later realized were whatever possessions the people could salvage from their houses.
We stopped to talk to Kevin Knight, who works in a different slum with an NGO. He told us that the development company 7NG, along with the ruling party in Cambodia, the Cambodian Peoples’ Party (CPP), were responsible for the evictions. Dey Krahorn was located in a prime location in downtown Phnom Penh and worth an estimated US$44 million.
Kevin explained that the 150 families living in the slum had been negotiating with 7NG in the weeks prior to the evictions. The company offered each family US$20,000 or an apartment in a resettlement site named Cham Chao, located at least 16 kilometers from the center of Phnom Penh.
At first this seemed like a reasonable offer, but what I failed to realize is that the residents of the slum had livelihoods, access to water and education, and other things that the city center offered. The majority of people living in Dey Krahorn made a living as street vendors, so if forced into a location with a reduced population they would lose their incomes.
The truth of what was happening just a few hundred yards away was finally settling in. Why was all of this happening here, I wondered, and why now? I learned that because of all of the foreign investment in the area (including our hotel), land prices had dramatically increased. According to the Cambodian League for the Promotion and Defense of Human Rights (LICADHO), slum evictions are not a new phenomenon in Cambodia. The country is suffering from a classic case of the rich getting richer while the poor get poorer.
According to the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in Cambodia, “The eviction was carried out in the middle of the night, with bulldozers, tear gas, rubber bullets, batons, and workers equipped with sticks and axes contracted to demolish the houses… The residents were thrown onto the street to watch their homes being destroyed.” A friend of Kevin’s who had been inside the slum when the eviction started described a woman collapsing in front of her house and bulldozers that continued to plow into her, sending her to the hospital with injuries.
After speaking with Kevin and other foreigners in the area, I realized how much the past really does influence the present. In order to understand what is happening in present day Cambodia, it is necessary to look to history, especially the period immediately following the Khmer Rouge.
When the Khmer Rouge came into power they wanted to make everyone in the society equal, which meant destroying money, books, private possessions, and land titles. During the period from 1975-1979, the cities of Cambodia were cleared out as the people were made to live and work in rural areas. After the fall of the Khmer Rouge in 1979, the people came flooding back into the cities. Since all of the land titles had been destroyed, people grabbed whatever they could, and the cities, especially Phnom Penh, became home to thousands of “squatters”.
Not everyone I spoke with explained the situation in the same manner. Some were sympathetic to the residents of Dey Krahorm, while others believed the government and 7NG were taking the required actions for the city to further “develop”. I was told by several people that the majority of the residents in Dey Krahorn had legal rights to their land. Some families were “squatting” illegally, but according to the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE), around 140 families living in Dey Krahorn had been there since the 1980s and were given rights to the land under the Cambodian Land Law (2001). Not only do the residents meet all of the preceding requirements, they have documentation to prove it.
According to Amnesty International, Cambodia is a state party to the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) and “has an obligation to protect the population against forced evictions… [the evictions at Dey Krahorn] show all too clearly how little respect Cambodian authorities have for these requirements”. Another person added that while the residents had been living in Dey Krahorn for years, the land was owned by the government so it was free to be taken at any time.
Regardless of the exact legal situation of the slums in Phnom Penh, it’s clear that Cambodia’s land title situation is in peril. A quick search for the land laws of Cambodia reveals relentless confusion in the period following the Khmer Rouge. We are only just starting to see the severe affects of the land laws today, as foreign investment and rapid growth in Phnom Penh cause once worthless land to become a precious commodity.
Christine's blog entry is part of a two-part series written by WIP Contributor Pushpa Iyer's students. In the coming weeks, more entries will follow. Part I, "Legacy, Responsibility, Justice and Spirituality" will contemplate how Cambodia is coping with its painful past. Part II, "Identity, Sex Trafficking, HIV/AIDS and Property Rights" will explore some of the challenges modern-day Cambodia faces. – Ed.
Christine Robinson grew up in the Chicago area and completed her undergraduate work at the University of Iowa with a BA in International Studies and Spanish. She is currently studying at the Monterey Institute of International Studies where she is pursuing a MPA in International Management. In her spare time, Christine enjoys sports, travel and studying languages.
July 27, 2009
by ChristineRobinson
It was two in the morning when we first heard the loudspeakers. My friend was annoyed thinking the noise was coming from people partying late, but we later learned something very different was happening. I got up early that morning to eat breakfast before a long day at the Killing Fields and Tuol Sleng. Walking downstairs, I saw about a hundred people outside our hotel in Phnom Penh including press, local police, and the Cambodian military.
I rushed outside and found a member of my group. He explained that the slum down the street, Dey Krahorn, was being forcefully evacuated by the military and police. A barrier kept us from getting too close, and a green fence had been put up along the perimeter. We saw trucks coming out of the slum carrying what I thought was junk, but later realized were whatever possessions the people could salvage from their houses.
We stopped to talk to Kevin Knight, who works in a different slum with an NGO. He told us that the development company 7NG, along with the ruling party in Cambodia, the Cambodian Peoples’ Party (CPP), were responsible for the evictions. Dey Krahorn was located in a prime location in downtown Phnom Penh and worth an estimated US$44 million.
Kevin explained that the 150 families living in the slum had been negotiating with 7NG in the weeks prior to the evictions. The company offered each family US$20,000 or an apartment in a resettlement site named Cham Chao, located at least 16 kilometers from the center of Phnom Penh.
At first this seemed like a reasonable offer, but what I failed to realize is that the residents of the slum had livelihoods, access to water and education, and other things that the city center offered. The majority of people living in Dey Krahorn made a living as street vendors, so if forced into a location with a reduced population they would lose their incomes.
The truth of what was happening just a few hundred yards away was finally settling in. Why was all of this happening here, I wondered, and why now? I learned that because of all of the foreign investment in the area (including our hotel), land prices had dramatically increased. According to the Cambodian League for the Promotion and Defense of Human Rights (LICADHO), slum evictions are not a new phenomenon in Cambodia. The country is suffering from a classic case of the rich getting richer while the poor get poorer.
According to the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in Cambodia, “The eviction was carried out in the middle of the night, with bulldozers, tear gas, rubber bullets, batons, and workers equipped with sticks and axes contracted to demolish the houses… The residents were thrown onto the street to watch their homes being destroyed.” A friend of Kevin’s who had been inside the slum when the eviction started described a woman collapsing in front of her house and bulldozers that continued to plow into her, sending her to the hospital with injuries.
After speaking with Kevin and other foreigners in the area, I realized how much the past really does influence the present. In order to understand what is happening in present day Cambodia, it is necessary to look to history, especially the period immediately following the Khmer Rouge.
When the Khmer Rouge came into power they wanted to make everyone in the society equal, which meant destroying money, books, private possessions, and land titles. During the period from 1975-1979, the cities of Cambodia were cleared out as the people were made to live and work in rural areas. After the fall of the Khmer Rouge in 1979, the people came flooding back into the cities. Since all of the land titles had been destroyed, people grabbed whatever they could, and the cities, especially Phnom Penh, became home to thousands of “squatters”.
Not everyone I spoke with explained the situation in the same manner. Some were sympathetic to the residents of Dey Krahorm, while others believed the government and 7NG were taking the required actions for the city to further “develop”. I was told by several people that the majority of the residents in Dey Krahorn had legal rights to their land. Some families were “squatting” illegally, but according to the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE), around 140 families living in Dey Krahorn had been there since the 1980s and were given rights to the land under the Cambodian Land Law (2001). Not only do the residents meet all of the preceding requirements, they have documentation to prove it.
According to Amnesty International, Cambodia is a state party to the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) and “has an obligation to protect the population against forced evictions… [the evictions at Dey Krahorn] show all too clearly how little respect Cambodian authorities have for these requirements”. Another person added that while the residents had been living in Dey Krahorn for years, the land was owned by the government so it was free to be taken at any time.
Regardless of the exact legal situation of the slums in Phnom Penh, it’s clear that Cambodia’s land title situation is in peril. A quick search for the land laws of Cambodia reveals relentless confusion in the period following the Khmer Rouge. We are only just starting to see the severe affects of the land laws today, as foreign investment and rapid growth in Phnom Penh cause once worthless land to become a precious commodity.
Christine's blog entry is part of a two-part series written by WIP Contributor Pushpa Iyer's students. In the coming weeks, more entries will follow. Part I, "Legacy, Responsibility, Justice and Spirituality" will contemplate how Cambodia is coping with its painful past. Part II, "Identity, Sex Trafficking, HIV/AIDS and Property Rights" will explore some of the challenges modern-day Cambodia faces. – Ed.
Christine Robinson grew up in the Chicago area and completed her undergraduate work at the University of Iowa with a BA in International Studies and Spanish. She is currently studying at the Monterey Institute of International Studies where she is pursuing a MPA in International Management. In her spare time, Christine enjoys sports, travel and studying languages.
27 July, 2009
Thai protesters urge gov't to withdraw from Thai-Cambodian statement on Preah Vihear
www.chinaview.cn 2009-07-27 15:45:00
BANGKOK, July 27 (Xinhua) -- A group of Thai people following up the Preah Vihear dispute rallied in front of the Government House Monday morning, calling on the government to withdraw from a joint Thai-Cambodian statement issued on June 18, 2008.
The joint statement, which supports Cambodia's unilateral listing of the ancient temple as a world heritage site, was signed by then Foreign Minister Noppadon Pattama without prior consent of the parliament, according to the Bangkok Post's website.
The government should formally inform the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization and the world community about the Thai withdrawal from the joint-Thai-Cambodian statement, said the group led by Walwipa Jaroonroj, an academic at the Institute of Thai Studies at Bangkok's Thammasat University.
Thailand should step up its opposition to Cambodia's unilateral registration of Preah Vihear as the world heritage site, otherwise Thailand could lose its sovereignty over the 4.6-square-kilometer border area, said the group.
The disputed area of 4.6 square kilometers along the Thai-Cambodian border has never been demarcated as the two neighboring countries have historically laid claim to the dispute-border site.
The area is located on a mountaintop on the Thai-Cambodia border, and it is easier to be accessed from Thailand.
The International Court of Justice ruled in 1962 that Preah Vihear temple belonged to Cambodia.
BANGKOK, July 27 (Xinhua) -- A group of Thai people following up the Preah Vihear dispute rallied in front of the Government House Monday morning, calling on the government to withdraw from a joint Thai-Cambodian statement issued on June 18, 2008.
The joint statement, which supports Cambodia's unilateral listing of the ancient temple as a world heritage site, was signed by then Foreign Minister Noppadon Pattama without prior consent of the parliament, according to the Bangkok Post's website.
The government should formally inform the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization and the world community about the Thai withdrawal from the joint-Thai-Cambodian statement, said the group led by Walwipa Jaroonroj, an academic at the Institute of Thai Studies at Bangkok's Thammasat University.
Thailand should step up its opposition to Cambodia's unilateral registration of Preah Vihear as the world heritage site, otherwise Thailand could lose its sovereignty over the 4.6-square-kilometer border area, said the group.
The disputed area of 4.6 square kilometers along the Thai-Cambodian border has never been demarcated as the two neighboring countries have historically laid claim to the dispute-border site.
The area is located on a mountaintop on the Thai-Cambodia border, and it is easier to be accessed from Thailand.
The International Court of Justice ruled in 1962 that Preah Vihear temple belonged to Cambodia.
Govt urged to revoke Preah Vihear joint statement
Writer: BangkokPost.com
Published: 27/07/2009 at 12:39 PM
About 30 members of a network of people following up the Preah Vihear dispute on Monday morning rallied in front of Government House and called for the government to withdraw from the joint Thai-Cambodian statement of June 18 last year which supports Cambodia's unilateral listing of the temple as a world heritage site.
The joint statement was signed by former foreign minister Noppadon Pattama, without prior consent of parliament.
The group, led by ML Walwipa Jaroonroj, an academic of the Institute of Thai Studies of Thammasat University, said the Democrat-led government should revoke the joint statement and formally informed the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) and the world community.
Thailand should also step up its opposition to Cambodia's unilateral registration of Preah Vihear as a world heritage site otherwise it could lose its sovereignty over the 4.6 squre kilometre area border area under dispute and a 1.5 million rai of forest tract to Cambodia, said the group.
Published: 27/07/2009 at 12:39 PM
About 30 members of a network of people following up the Preah Vihear dispute on Monday morning rallied in front of Government House and called for the government to withdraw from the joint Thai-Cambodian statement of June 18 last year which supports Cambodia's unilateral listing of the temple as a world heritage site.
The joint statement was signed by former foreign minister Noppadon Pattama, without prior consent of parliament.
The group, led by ML Walwipa Jaroonroj, an academic of the Institute of Thai Studies of Thammasat University, said the Democrat-led government should revoke the joint statement and formally informed the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) and the world community.
Thailand should also step up its opposition to Cambodia's unilateral registration of Preah Vihear as a world heritage site otherwise it could lose its sovereignty over the 4.6 squre kilometre area border area under dispute and a 1.5 million rai of forest tract to Cambodia, said the group.
Civil Society Concerned about Independence of Phnom Penh Municipal Court
STATEMENT
Civil Society Concerned about Independence of Phnom Penh Municipal Court
Phnom Penh, 24 July 2009
The Cambodian Human Rights Action Committee (CHRAC), a coalition of 21 NGOs, is
expressing its grave concern about a recent “defamation” court case heard by Phnom Penh
municipal court against Mrs. Mu Sochua, a female parliamentarian of the Sam Rainsy
Party, on 24 July 2009.
According to its monitoring of this morning court proceeding, CHRAC notes that the
municipal’s prosecutor decided to charge Mrs. Mu Sochua of defamation after a press
conference was organized by her at her party office, as a result of Prime Minister’s speech
of “a strong lady” in April this year. In this morning hearing, fully participated by national
and international public and observers, Mrs. Mu Sochua was self-represented in the court
room due to no any defense lawyer to represent her in this court case.
CHRAC therefore calls for the municipal court, in the future, to provide a legal counsel to
the requested party in order to ensure “equality of arms” before the court. CHRAC
further urges also that the judge should act independently and impartially in making its
judgment of the case to be announced in the upcoming days based on its high spirit of
supporting, protecting and promoting freedom of expression in Cambodia which is fully
guaranteed in the Constitution.
For more information, please contact:
Mr. Sok Sam Oeun CHRAC Chairman/CDP Executive Director Tel: 012 901 199
Mr. Thun Saray President of ADHOC Tel: 016 880 509
Mr. Hang Chhaya Executive Director of KID Tel: 012 865 910
Ms. Say Vathany Executive Director of CWCC Tel: 092 993 358
The Role of Parents in Child Trafficking
Source: Examiner.com
July 25, 9:35 AM
Lawrence Gist, LA County Foreign Policy Examiner
URL: http://www.examiner.com/x-16503-LA-County-Foreign-Policy-Examiner~y2009m7d25-The-Role-of-Parents-in-Child-Trafficking
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said late last month of the release of the “Ninth Annual Trafficking in Persons Report” that “around the world, millions of people are living in bondage. They labor in fields and factories under brutal employers who threaten them with violence if they try to escape. They work in homes for families that keep them virtually imprisoned. They are forced to work as prostitutes or to beg in the streets, fearful of the consequences if they fail to earn their daily quota. They are women, men, and children of all ages, and they are often held far from home with no money, no connections, and no way to ask for help.”
This is modern slavery, a crime that spans the globe, providing ruthless employers with an endless supply of people to abuse for financial gain. Human trafficking is a crime with many victims: not only those who are trafficked, but also the families they leave behind, some of whom never see their loved ones again, said Secretary Clinton.
With this report, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said, we hope to shine the light brightly on the scope and scale of modern slavery so all governments can see where progress has been made and where more is needed. Trafficking thrives in the shadows, and it can be easy to dismiss it as something that happens to someone else, somewhere else. But that’s not the case. Trafficking is a crime that involves every nation on earth, and that includes our own.
There is a misconception that trafficking and forced labor are not problems here in the United States. In point of fact, Secretary Clinton stated that “we’ve been reminded of this in recent weeks, where authorities uncovered a scheme to enslave foreign workers as laborers for hotels and construction sites in 14 Midwestern states.”
One of the areas addressed within the report is the role of parents in child trafficking. The treatment of this topic within the report is summarized as follows:
When Maria was five, her father’s common-law wife started selling her for prostitution in Nicaragua. After a few years, NGO workers found Maria living in the city dump and took her to a home for little girls. She behaved in a sexually inappropriate manner with the other girls, as that was the only life she had ever known. She was asked to leave that children’s home. Maria was taken to another children’s home for her protection while investigators documented her abuse and worked to terminate her father’s parental rights.
Parents are often among the victims in child trafficking cases. Traffickers convince them to part with their children with false promises of schooling or prosperity. But in some cases parents may also play an active role in the trafficking of children.
In the last year, anti-trafficking police in Greece reported an increase in trafficking of children by their parents. Albanian Roma parents bring their children to Greece, where they force them to beg or sell goods on the street. According to some NGOs, Roma parents in Greece also rent or sell their children to third parties for forced labor.
A 2007 study by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) found that some Cambodian parents sell their children into prostitution or domestic servitude to repay debts. In Niger, boys trafficked for forced cattle herding sometimes escape their employers and return to their parents. The boys arrive home with visible signs of physical and psychological abuse. But many parents return their sons against their will to their employers, angry that the child has left an opportunity to learn a trade.
To combat these types of child trafficking, law enforcement must send a strong message that these practices will not be tolerated. Some countries have already started taking steps. In January 2008, Albania passed a law that specifically criminalizes forced begging of children by parents. Laws in Niger, Senegal, and Togo also prohibit trafficking by parents.
Despite the prevalence of the problem, police and judicial authorities often do not recognize it. In January 2008, a South African court dismissed a trafficking case after learning that the victims’ parents had allowed the trafficker to take the children to Cape Town, where the exploitation occurred. Courts should not withdraw cases on the basis of parental consent.
Social workers and investigators must be educated about the role parents may play in trafficking scenarios.
Researchers investigating child trafficking on West African cocoa farms mistakenly determined, for example, that where the employer is a close relative of the child laborer, the child is less likely to be trafficked.
Public -Private Sector Partnerships: A Powerful Tool
With limited resources in great demand, government, corporate, and NGO leaders are coming together to find new ways to combat human trafficking. These partnerships have varied in size, scale, and duration, though they have one key common element: the desire to harness various competencies to tackle human trafficking.
* In 2008, LexisNexis, an online database service, partnered with the U.S. National Human Trafficking Resource Center (NHTRC) to develop a national database of social service providers for the Center’s hotline. In Southeast Asia, LexisNexis partnered with a leading anti-trafficking NGO and taught technical skills to the shelter’s staff. The company also created an online resource center for attorneys who work with human trafficking victims; it collaborated with the American Bar Association (ABA) to support a training institute on civil remedies for TIP victims, which trained lawyers from six countries and across the United States.
* Wyndham Hotel Group partnered with the anti-trafficking NGO Polaris Project and made hundreds of free hotel rooms available for trafficking victims in emergency situations.
* U.S. information technology company Microsoft has supported local NGO partners in Asia. By providing basic information skills training, Microsoft has helped people in underserved communities find meaningful employment that lower their vulnerabilities to human trafficking. Microsoft has also partnered with the International Center for Missing and Exploited Children, child protection NGOs, the ABA, and U.S. law enforcement to conduct law enforcement training on computer-related crimes involving the commercial sexual exploitation of children.
* Travel corporation Carlson Companies partnered with NGOs to develop training materials for its hotel staff on how to recognize and report on child sex tourism. Carlson Companies also provided hotel conference facilities for training of local travel, tourism, and hospitality employees.
* Media and film companies have been vehicles for raising awareness on human trafficking. The U.S. Government partnered with Priority Films to make the film “Holly” about child sex trafficking and sponsor expert discussions; it partnered with Lifetime Television to provide the television movie “Human Trafficking” to every U.S. Embassy for local screenings; and it partnered with Worldwide Documentaries to disseminate a DVD on human trafficking in conjunction with the release of the 2008 Trafficking in Persons Report. Through partnerships like these, private sector companies gain trust and legitimacy from consumers and earn the support of socially conscious buyers and investors. For the anti-trafficking community, these partnerships extend expertise, deepen resources, and stimulate creativity to fight human trafficking around the world.
Debunking Common Trafficking Myths
Initial Consent: A person may agree to migrate legally or illegally or take a job willingly. But once that work or service is no longer voluntary, that person becomes a victim of forced labor or forced prostitution and should accordingly receive the protections contemplated by the 2000 UN TIP Protocol. Once a person’s work is recruited or compelled by the use or threat of physical violence or the abuse or threatened abuse of the legal process, the person’s previous consent or effort to obtain employment with the trafficker becomes irrelevant.
A person may agree to work for an employer initially but later decide to stop working because the conditions are not what they agreed to. If an employer then uses force, fraud, or coercion to retain the person’s labor or services, the employer becomes a trafficking offender and the employee becomes a victim.
In April 2008, this type of misplaced reliance on a worker’s initial consent led to the deportation of three Thai victims from a European country because, according to the head of the anti-trafficking police unit in that country, the victims had consented to the employment and had arrived voluntarily in that country as guest workers. The victims in this case discovered their employment conditions were vastly different from what they expected when they initially accepted their jobs and traveled to Europe; further, their employers retained their passports, forced them to sometimes work without compensation, and threatened to turn them over to police if they did not work as they were told.
Prior Work History: Previous employment choices also do not exclude the possibility that a person may be a victim of trafficking. Some government officials fail to identify victims of sex trafficking because they may have willingly worked in the sex industry prior to being trafficked. Law enforcement may fail also to identify victims of labor trafficking because they are migrant workers and may have previously worked in difficult conditions, either legally or illegally. Whether a person is a victim of labor trafficking turns on whether that person’s service or labor was induced by force, fraud, or coercion.
Wage Payment: Case law from U.S. criminal cases has established that payment of a wage or salary is not a definitive indicator that the labor or service is voluntary. If a person is compelled to labor through the use of force or coercion—including the use of nonphysical forms of coercion such as financial harm—then that work or service is forced, even if he is paid or compensated for the work.
What’s in a Name ? Human Trafficking in Translation
The British abolition movement in the late 18th century achieved a ban on the trade or transportation of slaves through the British Empire in 1807. That focus on the trade of slaves—as opposed to the servitude itself—continues to this day and is reflected in terminology used around the globe.
Finding the right words to describe the crime remains a persistent challenge in combating human trafficking. Most formulations used to describe trafficking focus on the trade or buying and selling of people, or they mean something closer to “smuggling,” which relates specifically to movement over borders. These words, including the word trafficking in English, may not adequately capture the most important aspect of the practice: exploitation.
In the Arabic phrase for human trafficking, al-ittijaar b’il-bashar, the word al-ittijaar derives from the root meaning “commerce” or “trade.” In the Russian phrase torgovlyei lyudmi, torgovlyei also translates to “trade.” And Germanic languages use the word handel or “trade” in their characterizations. The Mandarin Chinese phrase gu?i mài, which means “to trick someone and sell them,” has an added element of trickery but is still focused on selling. Another less common Mandarin phrase, fàn mài rén kou, translates to “the buying and selling of humans.”
The French la traite des personnes and the Spanish la trata de personas adopt the same terms used to discuss negotiations or trade agreements. Officials in some French-speaking countries hesitate to use la traite because of immediate association with la traite des noirs, describing the transatlantic slave trade from Africa. In many Spanish-speaking countries, la trata is quickly associated with la trata de blancas, an older legal term that refers specifically to the selling of white women into prostitution. Still, those phrases are preferred over le trafic des migrants and el tráfico de personas, which imply something closer to “smuggling.” In Latin America, el tráfico also is easily associated with drug and arms trade.
The issue is more complicated when considering local languages, many of which do not have any words to describe human trafficking, although the practice is widespread. In East Africa, the Swahili phrase usafirishaji haramu wa binadamu translates to “illegal transportation of human beings.” But use of this phrase has caused further confusion with police and conflation with “smuggling.” Some officials use usafirishaji na biashara haramu ya watu, which means “illegal transportation and trade in people.” But these words, like those in English and other languages, still fail to invoke concepts such as unyonyaji (“exploitation”) or utumwa (“slavery”)—the key elements of the crime.
These limited characterizations may lead to confusion in creating effective legislation or policies to prosecute offenders and protect victims of human trafficking. A focus on movement would ignore those people who are trafficked within their own countries, regions, or towns. A focus on trade or buying and selling does not highlight the fraud or coercion often involved in human trafficking. It excludes the many victims who are never “bought” or “sold” but rather “self-present” to exploiters who then traffic them and victims who are otherwise deceived or defrauded into a form of servitude.
Human trafficking, in essence, is a modern-day form of slavery. It involves exploitation and forced servitude. To recognize and address all forms of human trafficking, the language used to discuss it should focus on the harsh reality of victims’ suffering and the horrific crimes of perpetrators.
Human Trafficking for Organ Removal
Mohammad Salim Khan woke up in a strange house and felt an excruciating pain in his abdomen. Unsure where he was, Khan asked a man wearing a surgical mask what had happened. “We have taken your kidney,” the stranger said, according to a January 2008 Associated Press report. “If you tell anyone, we’ll shoot you.”
Six days earlier, Khan, a 33-year-old Indian day laborer from New Delhi, had been approached by a bearded man offering a construction job. The man explained that the work would pay $4 a day – not unusual in India – and would last three months. Khan, a father of five, jumped at the chance for work.
He traveled with the man to a small town several hours away. Once there, Khan was locked in a room and forced at gunpoint to give a blood sample and take drugs that made him unconscious. He didn’t wake up until after surgery.
Police raided the illegal clinic afterward, rescuing Khan and two other men. Khan never received money for his kidney, and it took months to recover physically. Indian authorities pursued charges against the doctor involved. Khan was trafficked for the purpose of organ removal.
The UN TIP Protocol prohibits the use of human trafficking for the purpose of organ removal. This may include situations in which a trafficker causes the involuntary removal of another living person’s organ, either for profit or for another benefit, such as to practice traditional medicine or witchcraft.
A far greater number of organs are obtained from people in the developing world, sometimes through exploitative means, and sold in a highly lucrative international market. The UN TIP Protocol does not cover this voluntary sale of organs for money, which is considered lawful in most countries.
But the demand for organs is rising as the world’s rich are growing older. At the same time, the world’s poor are growing poorer, and the potential for more human trafficking cases like Khan’s is increasing. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 10 percent of the 70,000 kidneys transplanted each year may originate on the black market.
Victim Restitution : Key to Justice , Key to Rebuilding a Life
In fiscal year 2008, U.S. courts ordered traffickers to pay restitution awards totaling more than $4.2 million.
Restitution: The process in which a court calculates the monetary loss of a trafficking victim or other person as a result of the crime and orders the traffickers to pay that sum to the victim, usually carrying a punitive cost in excess of simple compensation for a victim’s lost wages. This can be the product of a successful criminal prosecution of a trafficking offender or an entirely separate civil complaint filed by the victim. The United States is the only country in which a compensation claim for the victim is automatically part of the criminal proceedings in trafficking cases.
Forfeiture: The process in which the government takes physical possession of the proceeds from, or material possessions involved in, the trafficking crime (cash, buildings, vehicles, etc.).
These processes can be used to provide compensation to trafficking victims in the United States. The TVPA includes provisions for mandatory restitution to trafficking victims and a provision allowing victims to sue trafficking offenders for compensatory and punitive damages. Many other countries have included victims’ rights to seek compensation through legal procedures.
Victim compensation meets the practical needs of survivors of human trafficking. It alleviates the monetary burden of the state and helps the victim pay for basic necessities, such as housing, food, and transportation, which can prevent their re-trafficking. It also allows compensation to third parties, such as medical and social service providers, who paid for services required as a result of the crime. But beyond providing for these immediate and critical needs, restitution has a restorative power. The philosophy behind restitution goes hand-in-hand with a victimcentered approach to trafficking. Providing the victim with their traffickers’ ill-gotten gains is critical to restoring a victim’s dignity, helping them gain power back from their exploiters who took advantage of their hope for a better life. Restitution and compensation attack the greed of the trafficker and the idea of a human being as a commodity. It is a way to ensure that victims receive access to justice.
Child Trafficking in Gold Mines
Some 20 to 30 percent of the world’s gold comes from artisanal mines throughout Africa, South America, and Asia. Artisanal mines are small-scale mines typically found in rural areas of developing countries. They offer communities and families a way to make a living in areas where few alternatives exist. But these mines are also the sites of modern-day slavery; of the two million children who work in goldmines worldwide, many are forced, often through debt bondage, to do back-breaking work in hazardous conditions.
Child laborers in gold mines face a number of dangers:
* Exposure to hazardous elements. Mercury is magnetically attracted to gold, making it a good tool for locating gold and separating it from the soil. In West Africa, children rub mercury into their hands before sifting soil through their fingers. In South America, children reportedly wash gold while standing in waist-deep water contaminated by mercury. Prolonged mercury exposure causes retardation, blindness, kidney damage, and tremors. To a lesser extent, child mine laborers are also exposed to cyanide and sulfur. A 2006 Harvard Medical School study found that children in gold mining communities in Ecuador showed neurological abnormalities resulting from mercury and cyanide exposure.
* Mine collapses, explosions. Artisanal mines frequently collapse, killing or injuring workers. Children are often lowered into narrow mine shafts as deep as 90 meters, sometimes for up to 18 hours. In Bolivia, trafficked boys as young as eight help detonate dynamite in the interior of gold mines.
* Long hours, back-breaking work. Traffickers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo subject children to debt bondage in gold mines, forcing them to work nine to ten hours daily digging tunnels and open-pit mines. In gold mines in Ethiopia, children are forced to work an average of 14 hours a day, six days a week. Children trafficked from Burkina Faso, Guinea, and Mali to gold mines in Côte d’Ivoire are held in slavery-like conditions and forced to work 10 hours a day, seven days a week. They receive little food and meager pay. In 2008, a Guinean child told the Associated Press he was promised $2 a day for his work in a gold mine but received only $40 after six months of backbreaking, coerced, and hazardous labor.
Most of the gold mined by these children enters the mainstream market. It is up to consumers to encourage the private sector and governments to take action against this exploitation. While some jewelers and mining companies formed the Council for Responsible Jewellery Practices in 2005 and developed a Code of Practices banning child labor, this code has not been enforced. The eradication of forced child labor in gold mines requires increased global activity, through implementation of corporate codes, enforcement of anti-trafficking and child labor laws, and development of programs to rescue children.
Buying or Negotiating a Victim’s Freedom
Among the repugnant aspects of human trafficking is the commodification of human lives: the assignment of a monetary value to the life of a woman, man, or child. Whether in an Indian brothel or in the Lake Volta fishing industry of Ghana, a price is placed on a victim’s freedom.
Anti-slavery organizations and activists have sometimes opted to pay the price of victims’ freedom from their exploiters. Negotiating a victim’s freedom or paying the ransom brings instant results. In the past year, a well-known international organization in Ghana endorsed this approach by negotiating with and providing financial incentives to Lake Volta fisherman who had enslaved boys in the fishing industry. While this releases victims from the bonds of modern-day slavery, the implications of this practice are more complicated.
If trafficking victims are freed because of a payment or negotiation, the trafficker remains unpunished and unrepentant and is free to find new victims to perform the same service. By “purchasing” a victim’s freedom, wellintentioned individuals or organizations may inadvertently provide traffickers with financial incentive to find new victims. While the numbers of victims rescued from compensated or negotiated releases can seem impressive, it is difficult to determine whether they lead to a net reduction in the number of victims. Still, the enslavement may continue without any cost or punishment to the trafficker or exploiter.
A more lasting and effective way to secure a victim’s freedom is through the application of law: holding traffickers and those who exploit trafficking victims accountable under criminal justice systems. The minimum standards of the TVPA call for the criminalization of all acts of trafficking, as does the 2000 UN TIP Protocol. Criminal provisions assign a punitive cost to this trade in humans, a cost that the exploiters are likely to respect and fear. Applying criminal laws also provides society with a measure of justice and hope that the cycle of entrapping additional victims can be broken. Negotiating with traffickers provides none of this.
Strengthening Prohibitions Against Forced Labor and Fraudulent Recruitment of Foreign Workers
The enactment of the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008 (TVPRA of 2008) strengthened the U.S. Government’s criminal statute on forced labor. It clarified nonphysical forms of coercion, which are recognized as potent tools used by traffickers. The act now explicitly provides a detailed explanation of “abuse or threatened abuse of law or legal process,” a prohibited means of coercion under both the forced labor and sex trafficking statutes. This is often seen practically in acts such as an employer threatening to have a migrant arrested and deported as an undocumented alien if he or she refused to enter into or continue a form of labor or services. The statute also explains that “serious harm,” another form of coercion, includes harming or threatening to harm someone financially in such a significant way that it would compel that person to enter into or continue a form of labor or services.
The TVPRA of 2008 also created a new criminal statute prohibiting fraud in foreign labor contracting, which imposes criminal liability on those who, knowingly and with intent to defraud, recruit workers from outside the United States for employment within the United States by means of materially false or fraudulent representations. While not a trafficking-in-persons offense per se, this crime may be closely linked to forced labor. The new statute prescribes a punishment of up to five years’ imprisonment.
Title 18 U.S. Code Section 1589 – Forced Labor.
(a) Whoever knowingly provides or obtains the labor or services of a person by any one of, or by any combination of, the following means:
(1) by means of force, threats of force, physical restraint, or threats of physical restraint to that person or another person;
(2) by means of serious harm or threats of serious harm to that person or another person;
(3) by means of the abuse or threatened abuse of law or legal process; or
(4) by means of any scheme, plan, or pattern intended to cause the person to believe that, if that person did not perform such labor or services, that person or another person would suffer serious harm or physical restraint, shall be punished as provided under subsection (d).
(b) Whoever knowingly benefits, financially or by receiving anything of value, from participation in a venture which has engaged in the providing or obtaining of labor or services by any of the means described in subsection (a), knowing or in reckless disregard of the fact that the venture has engaged in the providing or obtaining of labor or services by any of such means, shall be punished as provided in subsection (d).
(c) In this section:
(1) the term “abuse or threatened abuse of law or legal process” means the use or threatened use of a law or legal process, whether administrative, civil, or criminal, in any manner or for any purpose for which the law was not designed, in order to exert pressure on another person to cause that person to take some action or refrain from taking some action.
(2) the term “serious harm” means any harm, whether physical or non-physical, including psychological, financial, or reputational harm that is sufficiently serious, under all the surrounding circumstances, to compel a reasonable person of the same background and in the same circumstances to perform or to continue performing labor or services in order to avoid incurring that harm.
(d) Whoever violates this section shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both. If death results from a violation of this section, or if the violation includes kidnapping, an attempt to kidnap, aggravated sexual abuse, or an attempt to kill, the defendant shall be fined under this title, imprisoned for any term of years or life, or both.”
Title 18 U.S. Code, Section 1351 (new statute) – Fraud in Foreign Labor Contracting “Whoever knowingly and with intent to defraud recruits, solicits, or hires a person outside the United States for purposes of employment in the United States by means of materially false or fraudulent pretenses, representations, or promises regarding that employment, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for not more than 5 years, or both.”
Trafficking of Burmese Refugees in Southeast Asia
Arun participated in the pro-democracy demonstrations 20 years ago in Burma as a university student. Identified and hunted by Burmese authorities, he fled to a neighboring country. There, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees issued refugee identity cards to Arun and his wife. A group of government-organized anti-migrant volunteers found the couple during a search for illegal immigrants; they destroyed their identity cards and sent them to a detention center. Several days later, in the early morning hours, immigration officials transported them by boat to the country’s international border. Without the money to buy their freedom, immigration officials sold them each for $200 to trafficking rings, which sent Arun to work on a fishing vessel and his wife to a brothel.
Persecution by the Burmese regime and bleak economic opportunities have led thousands of Burmese political dissidents and ethnic minorities to flee the country during the past 20 years with hopes of a better life elsewhere in Asia. In Burma, they face abuses including forced labor, forced relocations, restricted movement, denial of education and economic opportunities, and religious persecution. Persecuted groups are often desperate enough to escape by any means possible, making them highly vulnerable to human trafficking. The risk of being trafficked is heightened by their marginalized political status, lack of economic or educational opportunities, and severe poverty.
Even those who are able to reach another country remain vulnerable to exploitation. Many Burmese attempt to settle in Malaysia, where there are widespread reports that immigration authorities have been involved in the trafficking of Burmese refugees from immigration detention centers to the Thai-Malaysian border. Immigration officials have sold refugees to Thai traffickers, who demand a ransom in exchange for freedom. The traffickers sell those who are unable to pay to brothels, fishing vessels, and plantations. The situation for these Burmese refugees has become so desperate that many have begun pooling their money in informal “insurance” programs to pay for their freedom if deported by Malaysian authorities and sold to traffickers. Many Burmese refugees flee the country by boat or overland to Thailand, often compelled to hire smugglers, who also engage in trafficking.
The Rohingya are a stateless people (see page 31) who are denied citizenship and land ownership rights in Burma, where they face religious and ethnic persecution from the Burmese military regime. Lacking documents or citizenship status, the Rohingya may be vulnerable to trafficking, including situations of forced labor.
Statelessness : A Key Vulnerability to Human Trafficking
Statelessness affects groups of people in all regions of the world. The most vulnerable groups include individuals from the former Soviet bloc, the Rohingya in Burma and throughout Asia, the Bidun in the Middle East, many of Europe’s Roma, the Bhutanese in Nepal, children of Haitian migrants in the Caribbean, denationalized Kurds, some Palestinians, some ethnic groups in Thailand and the Horn of Africa, and many others around the world, according to the NGO Refugees International.
A stateless person is someone who, under national laws, does not have nationality – the legal bond between a government and an individual – in any country. Citizenship gives a person a legal identity, a nationality, and the ability to participate in society with dignity. A stateless person often can’t go to school; get health care; register a birth, marriage, or death; work or travel legally; own property; or open a bank account wherever they live. Although the Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognizes that everyone has the right to a nationality, an estimated 12 million people around the world are legally or de facto stateless today.
Stateless populations are easy targets for forced labor, land confiscation, displacement, and other forms of persecution and exploitation. Without a nationality or legal citizenship, they may lack protection from police or access to systems of justice. In their desperate struggle for survival, stateless people often turn to human smugglers and traffickers to help them escape discrimination or government persecution. They become victims again and again as the problems of statelessness, refugee issues, and trafficking intersect.
Stateless people who are trafficked face particular vulnerabilities. They often lack identity or travel documents, putting them at risk of arrest when they travel—voluntarily or by force—outside of their communities. Without documents or citizenship status, stateless trafficking victims have little protection from their country of habitual residence. They may find it impossible to return, while at the same time having no legal status in their new country. Repatriation is problematic for stateless people regardless of whether they were trafficked or not.
Sometimes human trafficking results in statelessness, as in the case of Vietnamese women trafficked as “mail-order brides” to Korea, Taiwan, People’s Republic of China, and other places. Thousands of Vietnamese women marry foreigners each year, with 86 percent of such marriages contracted for economic reasons, according to the Viet Nam Women’s Union of Ho Chi Minh City. The process of naturalizing in their husband’s country often requires the women to renounce their Vietnamese citizenship. For those who are trafficked under the false pretense of marriage, the naturalization process is never completed and they become stateless, often passing their predicament on to their children. The Government of Vietnam is considering new nationality laws that would help prevent this problem by allowing dual citizenship.
Other measures to prevent and resolve situations of statelessness include birth registration campaigns and more efficient, transparent, and accessible avenues for acquiring legal residency or citizenship. Organizations working with trafficking victims can help by creating awareness, identifying stateless individuals, and assisting with procedures to acquire nationality. For countries or regions that share cross-border populations, harmonized approaches to documentation and civil registration can be key efforts to preventing statelessness and human trafficking.
Detaining Adult Victims in Shelters : A Bad Practice
Governments often first encounter a victim or confirm the victim status of a person through the initial detention or even formal arrest of that person. Whether through raids on a brothel suspected of exploiting trafficking victims or through the detention of undocumented aliens, law enforcement actions are often the precursor to identifying trafficking victims.
Once positively identified, however, law enforcement authorities should remove victims as quickly as possible from detention centers or jails and refer them to appropriate care facilities where they can receive counseling, shelter, medical care, and legal aid. This should apply to all victims, regardless of nationality and regardless of immigration status.
For adult victims, the government should obtain their informed consent before committing them to more than a temporary stay in a shelter facility. Victims should be provided with available options. For child victims of trafficking, the government should designate an appropriate authority with responsibility for the care, custody, and best interests of the child. The state may take temporary or longer-term custody while the child is in a temporary shelter or with an appropriate care provider.
According to an August 2008 paper published by the Australian Agency for International Development, governments often neglect to obtain the full and informed consent of adult trafficking victims when placing them in a government-run or governmentfunded shelter. This detention can impede a victim’s rehabilitation as the victim feels confined and denied basic freedoms—the hallmark of trafficking experiences. Lengthy detention without the ability to work and earn income can hurt a victim and a victim’s family economically. As noted in a path-breaking recent report by the NEXUS Institute on victims of trafficking who reject assistance, adult victims must be given the option of receiving assistance on their own terms—without physical restraint or confinement—or of rejecting all assistance from the state or others. At the core of human trafficking is the loss of basic freedoms; any effective remedy for victims must include a restoration of all such freedoms.
Gender Imbalance in Human Trafficking
“The root causes of migration and trafficking greatly overlap. The lack of rights afforded to women serves as the primary causative factor at the root of both women’s migrations and trafficking in women...By failure to protect and promote women’s civil, political, economic and social rights, governments create situations in which trafficking flourishes.” -- Radhika Coomaraswamy, former UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women
According to the ILO, the majority of people trafficked for sexual exploitation or subjected to forced labor are female. According to researchers, both the supply and demand sides of the trade in human beings are fed by “gendered” vulnerabilities to trafficking. These vulnerabilities are the result of political, economic, and development processes that may leave some women socially and economically dependent on men. If that support from men becomes limited or withdrawn, women become dangerously susceptible to abuse. They often have no individual protection or recognition under the law, inadequate access to healthcare and education, poor employment prospects, little opportunity to own property, or high levels of social isolation. All this makes some women easy targets for harassment, violence, and human trafficking.
Research links the disproportionate demand for female trafficking victims to the growth of certain “feminized” economic sectors (commercial sex, the “bride trade,” domestic service) and other sectors characterized by low wages, hazardous conditions, and an absence of collective bargaining mechanisms. Exploitative employers prefer to use trafficked women—traditionally seen as submissive, cheap, and pliable—for simple and repetitive tasks in agriculture, food processing, labor-intensive manufacturing, and domestic servitude.
In countries where women’s economic status has improved, significantly fewer local women participate in commercial sex. Traffickers bring in more female victims to address the demand and also take advantage of women who migrate voluntarily to work in any industry. As commercial sex is illegal in most countries, traffickers use the resulting illegal status of migrant women that have been trafficked into commercial sex to threaten or coerce them against leaving.
Gendered vulnerabilities fostered by social and institutional weaknesses in some societies—discriminatory laws and practices that tie a woman’s legal recognition, property rights, and economic opportunities to someone else—make women more likely than men to become trafficking victims. A woman who exists only through a male guardian who controls her income, identification, citizenship, and physical well-being is more susceptible to becoming a trafficking victim.
In many cultures, new widows must adhere to strict mourning practices, such as a month of isolation, or become outcasts. Despite official inheritance laws, during her isolation the relatives of a deceased man may confiscate the man’s property from his widow and children. In many cases, without her husband’s permission the destitute widow may not withdraw money from her bank account, register her husband’s death or their child’s birth, receive a passport, or take a job. Without a birth certificate, she cannot enroll her child in public school or see the doctor at the local clinic. Desperate to feed her child, the widow becomes easy prey for human traffickers.
International Woman of Courage
Hadizatou Mani, Niger
Hadizatou Mani was born into slavery. When she was 12, she was sold for $500. Her new owner, a man in his 60s, sent her to work long hours in the field, beat her, raped her, and made her bear him three children.
When Niger criminalized slavery in 2003, Ms. Mani’s owner kept the news from her and tried to convince village authorities that she was not a slave but one of his wives. When Ms. Mani finally won her “certificate of liberation” in 2005 and married a man of her choice, her former master charged her with bigamy. Ms. Mani served two months of a six-month prison sentence.
Ms. Mani worked with the local NGO Timidria and the British NGO Anti-Slavery International to bring a case to the Court of Justice of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), charging that the Government of Niger had not successfully protected her rights under its anti-slavery laws.
“It was very difficult to challenge my former master and to speak out when people see you as nothing more than a slave,” Ms. Mani said in comments published by Anti-Slavery International. “But I knew that this was the only way to protect my child from suffering the same fate as myself. Nobody deserves to be enslaved. We are all equal and deserve to be treated the same…no woman should suffer the way I did.”
Despite direct and indirect pressure to drop her suit, Ms. Mani pressed forward with her case. On October 27, 2008, ECOWAS condemned Ms. Mani’s enslavement, ruled that the Government of Niger had not protected her rights, and ordered it to pay Ms. Mani the equivalent of $19,800. To its credit, and as an indication of a desire to put slavery in the past, the Government of Niger accepted the verdict and paid the fine in March 2009.
Human rights laws are useless if not enforced. Timidria and other Nigerien NGOs had suggested before this verdict that Niger’s anti-slavery laws were a “charm offensive” and were “passed for Westerners.” Ms. Mani achieved a victory not only for herself, but for the people still enslaved in Niger and elsewhere in West Africa. Her bravery is a ray of hope to them. And the ECOWAS court decision is a step forward for the region, sending a strong message to the governments of Niger and other countries that anti-slavery laws must be more than words on paper.
Ms. Mani was among the recipients of the U.S. Secretary of State’s 2009 Award for International Women of Courage.
Legal Assistance for Trafficking Victims
Helping trafficking victims access legal avenues to justice, restitution, and other compensation for their suffering is a key element of any effective victim protection strategy. It is particularly crucial in addressing the needs of foreign victims who are not familiar with laws, customs, rights, and procedures in the country to which they were trafficked.
The laws and legal process in most countries are not easily accessed or understood by people who do not have legal training. Rescued human trafficking victims may fear possible criminal charges or deportation, retaliation by traffickers if they give information to police, or attacks against family members. At the same time, they need services such as medical care, food, clothing, and safe housing. Access to legal advice and information can help them through the stress and confusion in the weeks and months following their rescue.
Legal assistance helps trafficking victims know their rights, obtain key information, and understand the options that are available to them.
Legal systems vary throughout the world and the needs of trafficking victims must be considered individually. NGOs that assist and shelter trafficking victims should assist victims with the following legal issues:
* Legal rights. Victims should know their legal rights, status, and the legal process in which proceedings will take place. They should know how to access services or benefits that may be available to them, such as interpretation, medical care, housing, education, etc.
* Immigration law and immigration proceedings. Victims trafficked across a border may not have proper documentation and may need assistance in obtaining identity documents. Victims may need immigration relief, if available, after rescue or during an extended stay in the destination country.
* Criminal law. Victims should not be punished for unlawful acts committed as a direct result of being trafficked. But they may need legal assistance if they are arrested or detained in the course of rescue. Victims should also have access to legal advice regarding criminal proceedings related to their case and available options regarding giving evidence and testimony. If possible, an attorney should accompany a victim to legal proceedings related to the victim’s case.
* Civil law. Victims should know of available avenues for restitution or compensation through a civil claim for damages against perpetrators or others responsible.
* Child victims. Trafficking victims under 18 should have access to legal representation related to custody, care, and juvenile law.
Domestic Violence and Human Trafficking
“Women still comprise the majority of the world’s poor, unfed, and unschooled. They are still subjected to rape as a tactic of war and exploited by traffickers globally in a billion dollar criminal business.” -- Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton, March 7, 2009
The low status of women in some societies, insufficient access to education, limitations on legal rights, and other forms of discrimination are recognized as “push factors” that combine with other situational problems such as conflict, civil instability, or an economic crisis to prompt young women to leave their communities. In many communities and cultures, violence against women is all too common, and laws intended to protect women are inadequate or not enforced. In addition to physical attacks and injuries, women who are victims of spouse or intimate partner abuse are often subjected by the abuser to constant berating, severe psychological abuse, and excessive levels of control over nearly every aspect of daily life. A history of domestic violence (spouse or intimate partner abuse) represents an added risk factor that may cause a victim to feel an urgent need to escape and leave her home and community to survive – and thus her vulnerability to exploitation is heightened.
Research has shown a clear link between sex trafficking and both pre-trafficking domestic violence and trafficking-related genderbased violence. Cathy Zimmerman, a noted authority on victim trauma, identified domestic and sexual violence as a key “push” factor that makes a woman vulnerable to trafficking. Almost 70 percent of adult female trafficking victims using services at an assistance program in London reported having experienced violence before being exploited in the destination setting.
Though the link between domestic violence and sex trafficking is welldocumented, the responses to each crime must be distinct. Victims of domestic violence and victims of sex trafficking suffer different traumas and require different therapies. Zimmerman’s research found that victims of sex trafficking often suffer symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, which for most women in care do not begin to decrease for at least 90 days; this is not as prevalent in victims of domestic violence. Sometimes there is an added cultural obstacle to caring for both types of victims in the same facility: in some socially conservative populations, victims of domestic violence resent the perceived stigma of prostitution attached to the victims of sex trafficking with whom they are cohabitating.
Like human trafficking, global recognition of domestic violence as a crime is growing. Services for victims are insufficient but increasing in most countries. In countries where resources are limited programs established to assist victims of domestic violence have been tapped in emergencies to shelter victims of human trafficking. But assisting victims of these two crimes in one setting is very challenging. It should only be attempted when the facility can provide a safe and supportive environment and when staff are properly trained to understand the safety, legal, medical, mental health, social, and cultural needs of the victims.
In Memoriam : Norma Hotaling
After overcoming sexual exploitation and drug addictions, Norma Hotaling devoted her life to ending the commercial sex trade in the United States. While she left behind a life of despair, homelessness, addiction, and prostitution, she used her experiences to educate others about the harms of sex trade. She became a passionate leader and was often called on to speak at conferences, counsel public policy experts, and testify before the U.S. Congress and state legislatures. She also addressed foreign audiences as a Department of State-funded speaker.
Ms. Hotaling co-founded the NGO Standing Against Global Exploitation (SAGE) in 1992 to provide resources, advocacy, and counseling for sexually exploited men and women. Her work led to a 2004 California law that allows prosecutors to charge pimps and johns with child abuse if they prostitute a minor.
In 1996, Ms. Hotaling helped the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office create the First Offender Prostitution Program, a unique class for men caught soliciting prostitutes. The initiative allows first offenders to have their charges dropped if they pay a $1,000 fine and participate in a six-hour course taught by sex trafficking experts, neighborhood activists, and doctors who discuss the downsides of prostitution. A 2008 U.S. Department of Justice study lauded the program, concluding that participants were 30 percent less likely than other men to be rearrested for soliciting prostitutes. The program is now replicated in 40 cities.
Ms. Hotaling was committed to demystifying and debunking the romantic notion of prostitution and getting people to understand that the practice treats women and girls as commodities. She worked to reframe prostitution as form of violence against women rather than a job. In 2008, while battling pancreatic cancer, Ms. Hotaling led a successful opposition to legislation that would have decriminalized prostitution in San Francisco.
In a 1997 interview, Ms. Hotaling described her life’s work for The San Francisco Chronicle:
“It’s like caring for orchids. They die so easily. But you take the dead-looking stem to someone who knows orchids and that person can look at the root and say, ‘Look! There’s still a little bit of life here.’”
Ms. Hotaling died in her San Francisco home in December. She was 57.
Forced Labor Costs Considerable : A View from the ILO
The Trafficking in Persons Report in recent years has focused increased attention on labor forms of human trafficking. A newly released ILO report on forced labor in the world – The Cost of Coercion (May 2009) – breaks new ground in assessing the economic impact of forced labor, including the impact of fraudulent recruitment of migrant workers. The report’s release is prescient, coming amidst a global financial crisis that affects a significant share of the world’s migrant work force and underscores the need for much stronger governmental and business community responses to forced labor.
Among the key conclusions of Cost of Coercion:
* Key manifestations of the global forced labor problem continue to be: slavery and abduction for labor; agriculture-based forced labor in rural areas; compulsory work on public projects; bonded labor in South Asia; forced labor exacted by the military – with a special emphasis on “Myanmar” (Burma); and forced labor related to labor migration – the “underside of globalization.”
* Forced labor represents a challenge for virtually every country in the world and is increasingly penetrating supply chains of mainstream companies in the formal economy.
* Forced labor can be induced by a number of means, including psychological (non-physical) coercion; abuse of legal processes – such as the threat of having a migrant detained and deported as an undocumented alien; threats of financial penalties, such as those linked with debts; and the confiscation of identity or travel documents.
* An estimated 8.1 million victims of forced labor in the world today are denied more than $20 billion due to the perpetrators of forced labor. These opportunity costs, or “stolen” wages, are incurred largely in the developing world and most significantly in Asia and the Pacific, which accounts for $8.9 billion, or almost half of forced labor’s costs in the world. As wages denied and not remitted to workers’ home countries, these costs can be viewed as an impediment to economic development.
* Little progress has been made since 2001 in improving data collection on forced labor; the process of estimating the problem “has hardly begun in most countries.” While victimizing far more people than sex trafficking, forced labor is also underrepresented by governments’ law enforcement efforts against human trafficking.
* ILO research has shown a clear relationship between amounts spent by migrant workers during their recruitment and the probability of their becoming victims of forced labor; the higher the cost, the greater the likelihood of forced labor. Excessive and often unlawful recruitment fees are often a key contributing factor to forced labor. Particular attention should be paid to private employment agencies, given their documented role in trafficking for labor exploitation.
* Migrants in the fishing industry or serving as domestic workers are particularly vulnerable to forced labor.
Source: Examiner.com
July 25, 9:35 AM
Lawrence Gist, LA County Foreign Policy Examiner
URL: http://www.examiner.com/x-16503-LA-County-Foreign-Policy-Examiner~y2009m7d25-The-Role-of-Parents-in-Child-Trafficking
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said late last month of the release of the “Ninth Annual Trafficking in Persons Report” that “around the world, millions of people are living in bondage. They labor in fields and factories under brutal employers who threaten them with violence if they try to escape. They work in homes for families that keep them virtually imprisoned. They are forced to work as prostitutes or to beg in the streets, fearful of the consequences if they fail to earn their daily quota. They are women, men, and children of all ages, and they are often held far from home with no money, no connections, and no way to ask for help.”
This is modern slavery, a crime that spans the globe, providing ruthless employers with an endless supply of people to abuse for financial gain. Human trafficking is a crime with many victims: not only those who are trafficked, but also the families they leave behind, some of whom never see their loved ones again, said Secretary Clinton.
With this report, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said, we hope to shine the light brightly on the scope and scale of modern slavery so all governments can see where progress has been made and where more is needed. Trafficking thrives in the shadows, and it can be easy to dismiss it as something that happens to someone else, somewhere else. But that’s not the case. Trafficking is a crime that involves every nation on earth, and that includes our own.
There is a misconception that trafficking and forced labor are not problems here in the United States. In point of fact, Secretary Clinton stated that “we’ve been reminded of this in recent weeks, where authorities uncovered a scheme to enslave foreign workers as laborers for hotels and construction sites in 14 Midwestern states.”
One of the areas addressed within the report is the role of parents in child trafficking. The treatment of this topic within the report is summarized as follows:
When Maria was five, her father’s common-law wife started selling her for prostitution in Nicaragua. After a few years, NGO workers found Maria living in the city dump and took her to a home for little girls. She behaved in a sexually inappropriate manner with the other girls, as that was the only life she had ever known. She was asked to leave that children’s home. Maria was taken to another children’s home for her protection while investigators documented her abuse and worked to terminate her father’s parental rights.
Parents are often among the victims in child trafficking cases. Traffickers convince them to part with their children with false promises of schooling or prosperity. But in some cases parents may also play an active role in the trafficking of children.
In the last year, anti-trafficking police in Greece reported an increase in trafficking of children by their parents. Albanian Roma parents bring their children to Greece, where they force them to beg or sell goods on the street. According to some NGOs, Roma parents in Greece also rent or sell their children to third parties for forced labor.
A 2007 study by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) found that some Cambodian parents sell their children into prostitution or domestic servitude to repay debts. In Niger, boys trafficked for forced cattle herding sometimes escape their employers and return to their parents. The boys arrive home with visible signs of physical and psychological abuse. But many parents return their sons against their will to their employers, angry that the child has left an opportunity to learn a trade.
To combat these types of child trafficking, law enforcement must send a strong message that these practices will not be tolerated. Some countries have already started taking steps. In January 2008, Albania passed a law that specifically criminalizes forced begging of children by parents. Laws in Niger, Senegal, and Togo also prohibit trafficking by parents.
Despite the prevalence of the problem, police and judicial authorities often do not recognize it. In January 2008, a South African court dismissed a trafficking case after learning that the victims’ parents had allowed the trafficker to take the children to Cape Town, where the exploitation occurred. Courts should not withdraw cases on the basis of parental consent.
Social workers and investigators must be educated about the role parents may play in trafficking scenarios.
Researchers investigating child trafficking on West African cocoa farms mistakenly determined, for example, that where the employer is a close relative of the child laborer, the child is less likely to be trafficked.
Public -Private Sector Partnerships: A Powerful Tool
With limited resources in great demand, government, corporate, and NGO leaders are coming together to find new ways to combat human trafficking. These partnerships have varied in size, scale, and duration, though they have one key common element: the desire to harness various competencies to tackle human trafficking.
* In 2008, LexisNexis, an online database service, partnered with the U.S. National Human Trafficking Resource Center (NHTRC) to develop a national database of social service providers for the Center’s hotline. In Southeast Asia, LexisNexis partnered with a leading anti-trafficking NGO and taught technical skills to the shelter’s staff. The company also created an online resource center for attorneys who work with human trafficking victims; it collaborated with the American Bar Association (ABA) to support a training institute on civil remedies for TIP victims, which trained lawyers from six countries and across the United States.
* Wyndham Hotel Group partnered with the anti-trafficking NGO Polaris Project and made hundreds of free hotel rooms available for trafficking victims in emergency situations.
* U.S. information technology company Microsoft has supported local NGO partners in Asia. By providing basic information skills training, Microsoft has helped people in underserved communities find meaningful employment that lower their vulnerabilities to human trafficking. Microsoft has also partnered with the International Center for Missing and Exploited Children, child protection NGOs, the ABA, and U.S. law enforcement to conduct law enforcement training on computer-related crimes involving the commercial sexual exploitation of children.
* Travel corporation Carlson Companies partnered with NGOs to develop training materials for its hotel staff on how to recognize and report on child sex tourism. Carlson Companies also provided hotel conference facilities for training of local travel, tourism, and hospitality employees.
* Media and film companies have been vehicles for raising awareness on human trafficking. The U.S. Government partnered with Priority Films to make the film “Holly” about child sex trafficking and sponsor expert discussions; it partnered with Lifetime Television to provide the television movie “Human Trafficking” to every U.S. Embassy for local screenings; and it partnered with Worldwide Documentaries to disseminate a DVD on human trafficking in conjunction with the release of the 2008 Trafficking in Persons Report. Through partnerships like these, private sector companies gain trust and legitimacy from consumers and earn the support of socially conscious buyers and investors. For the anti-trafficking community, these partnerships extend expertise, deepen resources, and stimulate creativity to fight human trafficking around the world.
Debunking Common Trafficking Myths
Initial Consent: A person may agree to migrate legally or illegally or take a job willingly. But once that work or service is no longer voluntary, that person becomes a victim of forced labor or forced prostitution and should accordingly receive the protections contemplated by the 2000 UN TIP Protocol. Once a person’s work is recruited or compelled by the use or threat of physical violence or the abuse or threatened abuse of the legal process, the person’s previous consent or effort to obtain employment with the trafficker becomes irrelevant.
A person may agree to work for an employer initially but later decide to stop working because the conditions are not what they agreed to. If an employer then uses force, fraud, or coercion to retain the person’s labor or services, the employer becomes a trafficking offender and the employee becomes a victim.
In April 2008, this type of misplaced reliance on a worker’s initial consent led to the deportation of three Thai victims from a European country because, according to the head of the anti-trafficking police unit in that country, the victims had consented to the employment and had arrived voluntarily in that country as guest workers. The victims in this case discovered their employment conditions were vastly different from what they expected when they initially accepted their jobs and traveled to Europe; further, their employers retained their passports, forced them to sometimes work without compensation, and threatened to turn them over to police if they did not work as they were told.
Prior Work History: Previous employment choices also do not exclude the possibility that a person may be a victim of trafficking. Some government officials fail to identify victims of sex trafficking because they may have willingly worked in the sex industry prior to being trafficked. Law enforcement may fail also to identify victims of labor trafficking because they are migrant workers and may have previously worked in difficult conditions, either legally or illegally. Whether a person is a victim of labor trafficking turns on whether that person’s service or labor was induced by force, fraud, or coercion.
Wage Payment: Case law from U.S. criminal cases has established that payment of a wage or salary is not a definitive indicator that the labor or service is voluntary. If a person is compelled to labor through the use of force or coercion—including the use of nonphysical forms of coercion such as financial harm—then that work or service is forced, even if he is paid or compensated for the work.
What’s in a Name ? Human Trafficking in Translation
The British abolition movement in the late 18th century achieved a ban on the trade or transportation of slaves through the British Empire in 1807. That focus on the trade of slaves—as opposed to the servitude itself—continues to this day and is reflected in terminology used around the globe.
Finding the right words to describe the crime remains a persistent challenge in combating human trafficking. Most formulations used to describe trafficking focus on the trade or buying and selling of people, or they mean something closer to “smuggling,” which relates specifically to movement over borders. These words, including the word trafficking in English, may not adequately capture the most important aspect of the practice: exploitation.
In the Arabic phrase for human trafficking, al-ittijaar b’il-bashar, the word al-ittijaar derives from the root meaning “commerce” or “trade.” In the Russian phrase torgovlyei lyudmi, torgovlyei also translates to “trade.” And Germanic languages use the word handel or “trade” in their characterizations. The Mandarin Chinese phrase gu?i mài, which means “to trick someone and sell them,” has an added element of trickery but is still focused on selling. Another less common Mandarin phrase, fàn mài rén kou, translates to “the buying and selling of humans.”
The French la traite des personnes and the Spanish la trata de personas adopt the same terms used to discuss negotiations or trade agreements. Officials in some French-speaking countries hesitate to use la traite because of immediate association with la traite des noirs, describing the transatlantic slave trade from Africa. In many Spanish-speaking countries, la trata is quickly associated with la trata de blancas, an older legal term that refers specifically to the selling of white women into prostitution. Still, those phrases are preferred over le trafic des migrants and el tráfico de personas, which imply something closer to “smuggling.” In Latin America, el tráfico also is easily associated with drug and arms trade.
The issue is more complicated when considering local languages, many of which do not have any words to describe human trafficking, although the practice is widespread. In East Africa, the Swahili phrase usafirishaji haramu wa binadamu translates to “illegal transportation of human beings.” But use of this phrase has caused further confusion with police and conflation with “smuggling.” Some officials use usafirishaji na biashara haramu ya watu, which means “illegal transportation and trade in people.” But these words, like those in English and other languages, still fail to invoke concepts such as unyonyaji (“exploitation”) or utumwa (“slavery”)—the key elements of the crime.
These limited characterizations may lead to confusion in creating effective legislation or policies to prosecute offenders and protect victims of human trafficking. A focus on movement would ignore those people who are trafficked within their own countries, regions, or towns. A focus on trade or buying and selling does not highlight the fraud or coercion often involved in human trafficking. It excludes the many victims who are never “bought” or “sold” but rather “self-present” to exploiters who then traffic them and victims who are otherwise deceived or defrauded into a form of servitude.
Human trafficking, in essence, is a modern-day form of slavery. It involves exploitation and forced servitude. To recognize and address all forms of human trafficking, the language used to discuss it should focus on the harsh reality of victims’ suffering and the horrific crimes of perpetrators.
Human Trafficking for Organ Removal
Mohammad Salim Khan woke up in a strange house and felt an excruciating pain in his abdomen. Unsure where he was, Khan asked a man wearing a surgical mask what had happened. “We have taken your kidney,” the stranger said, according to a January 2008 Associated Press report. “If you tell anyone, we’ll shoot you.”
Six days earlier, Khan, a 33-year-old Indian day laborer from New Delhi, had been approached by a bearded man offering a construction job. The man explained that the work would pay $4 a day – not unusual in India – and would last three months. Khan, a father of five, jumped at the chance for work.
He traveled with the man to a small town several hours away. Once there, Khan was locked in a room and forced at gunpoint to give a blood sample and take drugs that made him unconscious. He didn’t wake up until after surgery.
Police raided the illegal clinic afterward, rescuing Khan and two other men. Khan never received money for his kidney, and it took months to recover physically. Indian authorities pursued charges against the doctor involved. Khan was trafficked for the purpose of organ removal.
The UN TIP Protocol prohibits the use of human trafficking for the purpose of organ removal. This may include situations in which a trafficker causes the involuntary removal of another living person’s organ, either for profit or for another benefit, such as to practice traditional medicine or witchcraft.
A far greater number of organs are obtained from people in the developing world, sometimes through exploitative means, and sold in a highly lucrative international market. The UN TIP Protocol does not cover this voluntary sale of organs for money, which is considered lawful in most countries.
But the demand for organs is rising as the world’s rich are growing older. At the same time, the world’s poor are growing poorer, and the potential for more human trafficking cases like Khan’s is increasing. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 10 percent of the 70,000 kidneys transplanted each year may originate on the black market.
Victim Restitution : Key to Justice , Key to Rebuilding a Life
In fiscal year 2008, U.S. courts ordered traffickers to pay restitution awards totaling more than $4.2 million.
Restitution: The process in which a court calculates the monetary loss of a trafficking victim or other person as a result of the crime and orders the traffickers to pay that sum to the victim, usually carrying a punitive cost in excess of simple compensation for a victim’s lost wages. This can be the product of a successful criminal prosecution of a trafficking offender or an entirely separate civil complaint filed by the victim. The United States is the only country in which a compensation claim for the victim is automatically part of the criminal proceedings in trafficking cases.
Forfeiture: The process in which the government takes physical possession of the proceeds from, or material possessions involved in, the trafficking crime (cash, buildings, vehicles, etc.).
These processes can be used to provide compensation to trafficking victims in the United States. The TVPA includes provisions for mandatory restitution to trafficking victims and a provision allowing victims to sue trafficking offenders for compensatory and punitive damages. Many other countries have included victims’ rights to seek compensation through legal procedures.
Victim compensation meets the practical needs of survivors of human trafficking. It alleviates the monetary burden of the state and helps the victim pay for basic necessities, such as housing, food, and transportation, which can prevent their re-trafficking. It also allows compensation to third parties, such as medical and social service providers, who paid for services required as a result of the crime. But beyond providing for these immediate and critical needs, restitution has a restorative power. The philosophy behind restitution goes hand-in-hand with a victimcentered approach to trafficking. Providing the victim with their traffickers’ ill-gotten gains is critical to restoring a victim’s dignity, helping them gain power back from their exploiters who took advantage of their hope for a better life. Restitution and compensation attack the greed of the trafficker and the idea of a human being as a commodity. It is a way to ensure that victims receive access to justice.
Child Trafficking in Gold Mines
Some 20 to 30 percent of the world’s gold comes from artisanal mines throughout Africa, South America, and Asia. Artisanal mines are small-scale mines typically found in rural areas of developing countries. They offer communities and families a way to make a living in areas where few alternatives exist. But these mines are also the sites of modern-day slavery; of the two million children who work in goldmines worldwide, many are forced, often through debt bondage, to do back-breaking work in hazardous conditions.
Child laborers in gold mines face a number of dangers:
* Exposure to hazardous elements. Mercury is magnetically attracted to gold, making it a good tool for locating gold and separating it from the soil. In West Africa, children rub mercury into their hands before sifting soil through their fingers. In South America, children reportedly wash gold while standing in waist-deep water contaminated by mercury. Prolonged mercury exposure causes retardation, blindness, kidney damage, and tremors. To a lesser extent, child mine laborers are also exposed to cyanide and sulfur. A 2006 Harvard Medical School study found that children in gold mining communities in Ecuador showed neurological abnormalities resulting from mercury and cyanide exposure.
* Mine collapses, explosions. Artisanal mines frequently collapse, killing or injuring workers. Children are often lowered into narrow mine shafts as deep as 90 meters, sometimes for up to 18 hours. In Bolivia, trafficked boys as young as eight help detonate dynamite in the interior of gold mines.
* Long hours, back-breaking work. Traffickers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo subject children to debt bondage in gold mines, forcing them to work nine to ten hours daily digging tunnels and open-pit mines. In gold mines in Ethiopia, children are forced to work an average of 14 hours a day, six days a week. Children trafficked from Burkina Faso, Guinea, and Mali to gold mines in Côte d’Ivoire are held in slavery-like conditions and forced to work 10 hours a day, seven days a week. They receive little food and meager pay. In 2008, a Guinean child told the Associated Press he was promised $2 a day for his work in a gold mine but received only $40 after six months of backbreaking, coerced, and hazardous labor.
Most of the gold mined by these children enters the mainstream market. It is up to consumers to encourage the private sector and governments to take action against this exploitation. While some jewelers and mining companies formed the Council for Responsible Jewellery Practices in 2005 and developed a Code of Practices banning child labor, this code has not been enforced. The eradication of forced child labor in gold mines requires increased global activity, through implementation of corporate codes, enforcement of anti-trafficking and child labor laws, and development of programs to rescue children.
Buying or Negotiating a Victim’s Freedom
Among the repugnant aspects of human trafficking is the commodification of human lives: the assignment of a monetary value to the life of a woman, man, or child. Whether in an Indian brothel or in the Lake Volta fishing industry of Ghana, a price is placed on a victim’s freedom.
Anti-slavery organizations and activists have sometimes opted to pay the price of victims’ freedom from their exploiters. Negotiating a victim’s freedom or paying the ransom brings instant results. In the past year, a well-known international organization in Ghana endorsed this approach by negotiating with and providing financial incentives to Lake Volta fisherman who had enslaved boys in the fishing industry. While this releases victims from the bonds of modern-day slavery, the implications of this practice are more complicated.
If trafficking victims are freed because of a payment or negotiation, the trafficker remains unpunished and unrepentant and is free to find new victims to perform the same service. By “purchasing” a victim’s freedom, wellintentioned individuals or organizations may inadvertently provide traffickers with financial incentive to find new victims. While the numbers of victims rescued from compensated or negotiated releases can seem impressive, it is difficult to determine whether they lead to a net reduction in the number of victims. Still, the enslavement may continue without any cost or punishment to the trafficker or exploiter.
A more lasting and effective way to secure a victim’s freedom is through the application of law: holding traffickers and those who exploit trafficking victims accountable under criminal justice systems. The minimum standards of the TVPA call for the criminalization of all acts of trafficking, as does the 2000 UN TIP Protocol. Criminal provisions assign a punitive cost to this trade in humans, a cost that the exploiters are likely to respect and fear. Applying criminal laws also provides society with a measure of justice and hope that the cycle of entrapping additional victims can be broken. Negotiating with traffickers provides none of this.
Strengthening Prohibitions Against Forced Labor and Fraudulent Recruitment of Foreign Workers
The enactment of the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008 (TVPRA of 2008) strengthened the U.S. Government’s criminal statute on forced labor. It clarified nonphysical forms of coercion, which are recognized as potent tools used by traffickers. The act now explicitly provides a detailed explanation of “abuse or threatened abuse of law or legal process,” a prohibited means of coercion under both the forced labor and sex trafficking statutes. This is often seen practically in acts such as an employer threatening to have a migrant arrested and deported as an undocumented alien if he or she refused to enter into or continue a form of labor or services. The statute also explains that “serious harm,” another form of coercion, includes harming or threatening to harm someone financially in such a significant way that it would compel that person to enter into or continue a form of labor or services.
The TVPRA of 2008 also created a new criminal statute prohibiting fraud in foreign labor contracting, which imposes criminal liability on those who, knowingly and with intent to defraud, recruit workers from outside the United States for employment within the United States by means of materially false or fraudulent representations. While not a trafficking-in-persons offense per se, this crime may be closely linked to forced labor. The new statute prescribes a punishment of up to five years’ imprisonment.
Title 18 U.S. Code Section 1589 – Forced Labor.
(a) Whoever knowingly provides or obtains the labor or services of a person by any one of, or by any combination of, the following means:
(1) by means of force, threats of force, physical restraint, or threats of physical restraint to that person or another person;
(2) by means of serious harm or threats of serious harm to that person or another person;
(3) by means of the abuse or threatened abuse of law or legal process; or
(4) by means of any scheme, plan, or pattern intended to cause the person to believe that, if that person did not perform such labor or services, that person or another person would suffer serious harm or physical restraint, shall be punished as provided under subsection (d).
(b) Whoever knowingly benefits, financially or by receiving anything of value, from participation in a venture which has engaged in the providing or obtaining of labor or services by any of the means described in subsection (a), knowing or in reckless disregard of the fact that the venture has engaged in the providing or obtaining of labor or services by any of such means, shall be punished as provided in subsection (d).
(c) In this section:
(1) the term “abuse or threatened abuse of law or legal process” means the use or threatened use of a law or legal process, whether administrative, civil, or criminal, in any manner or for any purpose for which the law was not designed, in order to exert pressure on another person to cause that person to take some action or refrain from taking some action.
(2) the term “serious harm” means any harm, whether physical or non-physical, including psychological, financial, or reputational harm that is sufficiently serious, under all the surrounding circumstances, to compel a reasonable person of the same background and in the same circumstances to perform or to continue performing labor or services in order to avoid incurring that harm.
(d) Whoever violates this section shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both. If death results from a violation of this section, or if the violation includes kidnapping, an attempt to kidnap, aggravated sexual abuse, or an attempt to kill, the defendant shall be fined under this title, imprisoned for any term of years or life, or both.”
Title 18 U.S. Code, Section 1351 (new statute) – Fraud in Foreign Labor Contracting “Whoever knowingly and with intent to defraud recruits, solicits, or hires a person outside the United States for purposes of employment in the United States by means of materially false or fraudulent pretenses, representations, or promises regarding that employment, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for not more than 5 years, or both.”
Trafficking of Burmese Refugees in Southeast Asia
Arun participated in the pro-democracy demonstrations 20 years ago in Burma as a university student. Identified and hunted by Burmese authorities, he fled to a neighboring country. There, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees issued refugee identity cards to Arun and his wife. A group of government-organized anti-migrant volunteers found the couple during a search for illegal immigrants; they destroyed their identity cards and sent them to a detention center. Several days later, in the early morning hours, immigration officials transported them by boat to the country’s international border. Without the money to buy their freedom, immigration officials sold them each for $200 to trafficking rings, which sent Arun to work on a fishing vessel and his wife to a brothel.
Persecution by the Burmese regime and bleak economic opportunities have led thousands of Burmese political dissidents and ethnic minorities to flee the country during the past 20 years with hopes of a better life elsewhere in Asia. In Burma, they face abuses including forced labor, forced relocations, restricted movement, denial of education and economic opportunities, and religious persecution. Persecuted groups are often desperate enough to escape by any means possible, making them highly vulnerable to human trafficking. The risk of being trafficked is heightened by their marginalized political status, lack of economic or educational opportunities, and severe poverty.
Even those who are able to reach another country remain vulnerable to exploitation. Many Burmese attempt to settle in Malaysia, where there are widespread reports that immigration authorities have been involved in the trafficking of Burmese refugees from immigration detention centers to the Thai-Malaysian border. Immigration officials have sold refugees to Thai traffickers, who demand a ransom in exchange for freedom. The traffickers sell those who are unable to pay to brothels, fishing vessels, and plantations. The situation for these Burmese refugees has become so desperate that many have begun pooling their money in informal “insurance” programs to pay for their freedom if deported by Malaysian authorities and sold to traffickers. Many Burmese refugees flee the country by boat or overland to Thailand, often compelled to hire smugglers, who also engage in trafficking.
The Rohingya are a stateless people (see page 31) who are denied citizenship and land ownership rights in Burma, where they face religious and ethnic persecution from the Burmese military regime. Lacking documents or citizenship status, the Rohingya may be vulnerable to trafficking, including situations of forced labor.
Statelessness : A Key Vulnerability to Human Trafficking
Statelessness affects groups of people in all regions of the world. The most vulnerable groups include individuals from the former Soviet bloc, the Rohingya in Burma and throughout Asia, the Bidun in the Middle East, many of Europe’s Roma, the Bhutanese in Nepal, children of Haitian migrants in the Caribbean, denationalized Kurds, some Palestinians, some ethnic groups in Thailand and the Horn of Africa, and many others around the world, according to the NGO Refugees International.
A stateless person is someone who, under national laws, does not have nationality – the legal bond between a government and an individual – in any country. Citizenship gives a person a legal identity, a nationality, and the ability to participate in society with dignity. A stateless person often can’t go to school; get health care; register a birth, marriage, or death; work or travel legally; own property; or open a bank account wherever they live. Although the Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognizes that everyone has the right to a nationality, an estimated 12 million people around the world are legally or de facto stateless today.
Stateless populations are easy targets for forced labor, land confiscation, displacement, and other forms of persecution and exploitation. Without a nationality or legal citizenship, they may lack protection from police or access to systems of justice. In their desperate struggle for survival, stateless people often turn to human smugglers and traffickers to help them escape discrimination or government persecution. They become victims again and again as the problems of statelessness, refugee issues, and trafficking intersect.
Stateless people who are trafficked face particular vulnerabilities. They often lack identity or travel documents, putting them at risk of arrest when they travel—voluntarily or by force—outside of their communities. Without documents or citizenship status, stateless trafficking victims have little protection from their country of habitual residence. They may find it impossible to return, while at the same time having no legal status in their new country. Repatriation is problematic for stateless people regardless of whether they were trafficked or not.
Sometimes human trafficking results in statelessness, as in the case of Vietnamese women trafficked as “mail-order brides” to Korea, Taiwan, People’s Republic of China, and other places. Thousands of Vietnamese women marry foreigners each year, with 86 percent of such marriages contracted for economic reasons, according to the Viet Nam Women’s Union of Ho Chi Minh City. The process of naturalizing in their husband’s country often requires the women to renounce their Vietnamese citizenship. For those who are trafficked under the false pretense of marriage, the naturalization process is never completed and they become stateless, often passing their predicament on to their children. The Government of Vietnam is considering new nationality laws that would help prevent this problem by allowing dual citizenship.
Other measures to prevent and resolve situations of statelessness include birth registration campaigns and more efficient, transparent, and accessible avenues for acquiring legal residency or citizenship. Organizations working with trafficking victims can help by creating awareness, identifying stateless individuals, and assisting with procedures to acquire nationality. For countries or regions that share cross-border populations, harmonized approaches to documentation and civil registration can be key efforts to preventing statelessness and human trafficking.
Detaining Adult Victims in Shelters : A Bad Practice
Governments often first encounter a victim or confirm the victim status of a person through the initial detention or even formal arrest of that person. Whether through raids on a brothel suspected of exploiting trafficking victims or through the detention of undocumented aliens, law enforcement actions are often the precursor to identifying trafficking victims.
Once positively identified, however, law enforcement authorities should remove victims as quickly as possible from detention centers or jails and refer them to appropriate care facilities where they can receive counseling, shelter, medical care, and legal aid. This should apply to all victims, regardless of nationality and regardless of immigration status.
For adult victims, the government should obtain their informed consent before committing them to more than a temporary stay in a shelter facility. Victims should be provided with available options. For child victims of trafficking, the government should designate an appropriate authority with responsibility for the care, custody, and best interests of the child. The state may take temporary or longer-term custody while the child is in a temporary shelter or with an appropriate care provider.
According to an August 2008 paper published by the Australian Agency for International Development, governments often neglect to obtain the full and informed consent of adult trafficking victims when placing them in a government-run or governmentfunded shelter. This detention can impede a victim’s rehabilitation as the victim feels confined and denied basic freedoms—the hallmark of trafficking experiences. Lengthy detention without the ability to work and earn income can hurt a victim and a victim’s family economically. As noted in a path-breaking recent report by the NEXUS Institute on victims of trafficking who reject assistance, adult victims must be given the option of receiving assistance on their own terms—without physical restraint or confinement—or of rejecting all assistance from the state or others. At the core of human trafficking is the loss of basic freedoms; any effective remedy for victims must include a restoration of all such freedoms.
Gender Imbalance in Human Trafficking
“The root causes of migration and trafficking greatly overlap. The lack of rights afforded to women serves as the primary causative factor at the root of both women’s migrations and trafficking in women...By failure to protect and promote women’s civil, political, economic and social rights, governments create situations in which trafficking flourishes.” -- Radhika Coomaraswamy, former UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women
According to the ILO, the majority of people trafficked for sexual exploitation or subjected to forced labor are female. According to researchers, both the supply and demand sides of the trade in human beings are fed by “gendered” vulnerabilities to trafficking. These vulnerabilities are the result of political, economic, and development processes that may leave some women socially and economically dependent on men. If that support from men becomes limited or withdrawn, women become dangerously susceptible to abuse. They often have no individual protection or recognition under the law, inadequate access to healthcare and education, poor employment prospects, little opportunity to own property, or high levels of social isolation. All this makes some women easy targets for harassment, violence, and human trafficking.
Research links the disproportionate demand for female trafficking victims to the growth of certain “feminized” economic sectors (commercial sex, the “bride trade,” domestic service) and other sectors characterized by low wages, hazardous conditions, and an absence of collective bargaining mechanisms. Exploitative employers prefer to use trafficked women—traditionally seen as submissive, cheap, and pliable—for simple and repetitive tasks in agriculture, food processing, labor-intensive manufacturing, and domestic servitude.
In countries where women’s economic status has improved, significantly fewer local women participate in commercial sex. Traffickers bring in more female victims to address the demand and also take advantage of women who migrate voluntarily to work in any industry. As commercial sex is illegal in most countries, traffickers use the resulting illegal status of migrant women that have been trafficked into commercial sex to threaten or coerce them against leaving.
Gendered vulnerabilities fostered by social and institutional weaknesses in some societies—discriminatory laws and practices that tie a woman’s legal recognition, property rights, and economic opportunities to someone else—make women more likely than men to become trafficking victims. A woman who exists only through a male guardian who controls her income, identification, citizenship, and physical well-being is more susceptible to becoming a trafficking victim.
In many cultures, new widows must adhere to strict mourning practices, such as a month of isolation, or become outcasts. Despite official inheritance laws, during her isolation the relatives of a deceased man may confiscate the man’s property from his widow and children. In many cases, without her husband’s permission the destitute widow may not withdraw money from her bank account, register her husband’s death or their child’s birth, receive a passport, or take a job. Without a birth certificate, she cannot enroll her child in public school or see the doctor at the local clinic. Desperate to feed her child, the widow becomes easy prey for human traffickers.
International Woman of Courage
Hadizatou Mani, Niger
Hadizatou Mani was born into slavery. When she was 12, she was sold for $500. Her new owner, a man in his 60s, sent her to work long hours in the field, beat her, raped her, and made her bear him three children.
When Niger criminalized slavery in 2003, Ms. Mani’s owner kept the news from her and tried to convince village authorities that she was not a slave but one of his wives. When Ms. Mani finally won her “certificate of liberation” in 2005 and married a man of her choice, her former master charged her with bigamy. Ms. Mani served two months of a six-month prison sentence.
Ms. Mani worked with the local NGO Timidria and the British NGO Anti-Slavery International to bring a case to the Court of Justice of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), charging that the Government of Niger had not successfully protected her rights under its anti-slavery laws.
“It was very difficult to challenge my former master and to speak out when people see you as nothing more than a slave,” Ms. Mani said in comments published by Anti-Slavery International. “But I knew that this was the only way to protect my child from suffering the same fate as myself. Nobody deserves to be enslaved. We are all equal and deserve to be treated the same…no woman should suffer the way I did.”
Despite direct and indirect pressure to drop her suit, Ms. Mani pressed forward with her case. On October 27, 2008, ECOWAS condemned Ms. Mani’s enslavement, ruled that the Government of Niger had not protected her rights, and ordered it to pay Ms. Mani the equivalent of $19,800. To its credit, and as an indication of a desire to put slavery in the past, the Government of Niger accepted the verdict and paid the fine in March 2009.
Human rights laws are useless if not enforced. Timidria and other Nigerien NGOs had suggested before this verdict that Niger’s anti-slavery laws were a “charm offensive” and were “passed for Westerners.” Ms. Mani achieved a victory not only for herself, but for the people still enslaved in Niger and elsewhere in West Africa. Her bravery is a ray of hope to them. And the ECOWAS court decision is a step forward for the region, sending a strong message to the governments of Niger and other countries that anti-slavery laws must be more than words on paper.
Ms. Mani was among the recipients of the U.S. Secretary of State’s 2009 Award for International Women of Courage.
Legal Assistance for Trafficking Victims
Helping trafficking victims access legal avenues to justice, restitution, and other compensation for their suffering is a key element of any effective victim protection strategy. It is particularly crucial in addressing the needs of foreign victims who are not familiar with laws, customs, rights, and procedures in the country to which they were trafficked.
The laws and legal process in most countries are not easily accessed or understood by people who do not have legal training. Rescued human trafficking victims may fear possible criminal charges or deportation, retaliation by traffickers if they give information to police, or attacks against family members. At the same time, they need services such as medical care, food, clothing, and safe housing. Access to legal advice and information can help them through the stress and confusion in the weeks and months following their rescue.
Legal assistance helps trafficking victims know their rights, obtain key information, and understand the options that are available to them.
Legal systems vary throughout the world and the needs of trafficking victims must be considered individually. NGOs that assist and shelter trafficking victims should assist victims with the following legal issues:
* Legal rights. Victims should know their legal rights, status, and the legal process in which proceedings will take place. They should know how to access services or benefits that may be available to them, such as interpretation, medical care, housing, education, etc.
* Immigration law and immigration proceedings. Victims trafficked across a border may not have proper documentation and may need assistance in obtaining identity documents. Victims may need immigration relief, if available, after rescue or during an extended stay in the destination country.
* Criminal law. Victims should not be punished for unlawful acts committed as a direct result of being trafficked. But they may need legal assistance if they are arrested or detained in the course of rescue. Victims should also have access to legal advice regarding criminal proceedings related to their case and available options regarding giving evidence and testimony. If possible, an attorney should accompany a victim to legal proceedings related to the victim’s case.
* Civil law. Victims should know of available avenues for restitution or compensation through a civil claim for damages against perpetrators or others responsible.
* Child victims. Trafficking victims under 18 should have access to legal representation related to custody, care, and juvenile law.
Domestic Violence and Human Trafficking
“Women still comprise the majority of the world’s poor, unfed, and unschooled. They are still subjected to rape as a tactic of war and exploited by traffickers globally in a billion dollar criminal business.” -- Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton, March 7, 2009
The low status of women in some societies, insufficient access to education, limitations on legal rights, and other forms of discrimination are recognized as “push factors” that combine with other situational problems such as conflict, civil instability, or an economic crisis to prompt young women to leave their communities. In many communities and cultures, violence against women is all too common, and laws intended to protect women are inadequate or not enforced. In addition to physical attacks and injuries, women who are victims of spouse or intimate partner abuse are often subjected by the abuser to constant berating, severe psychological abuse, and excessive levels of control over nearly every aspect of daily life. A history of domestic violence (spouse or intimate partner abuse) represents an added risk factor that may cause a victim to feel an urgent need to escape and leave her home and community to survive – and thus her vulnerability to exploitation is heightened.
Research has shown a clear link between sex trafficking and both pre-trafficking domestic violence and trafficking-related genderbased violence. Cathy Zimmerman, a noted authority on victim trauma, identified domestic and sexual violence as a key “push” factor that makes a woman vulnerable to trafficking. Almost 70 percent of adult female trafficking victims using services at an assistance program in London reported having experienced violence before being exploited in the destination setting.
Though the link between domestic violence and sex trafficking is welldocumented, the responses to each crime must be distinct. Victims of domestic violence and victims of sex trafficking suffer different traumas and require different therapies. Zimmerman’s research found that victims of sex trafficking often suffer symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, which for most women in care do not begin to decrease for at least 90 days; this is not as prevalent in victims of domestic violence. Sometimes there is an added cultural obstacle to caring for both types of victims in the same facility: in some socially conservative populations, victims of domestic violence resent the perceived stigma of prostitution attached to the victims of sex trafficking with whom they are cohabitating.
Like human trafficking, global recognition of domestic violence as a crime is growing. Services for victims are insufficient but increasing in most countries. In countries where resources are limited programs established to assist victims of domestic violence have been tapped in emergencies to shelter victims of human trafficking. But assisting victims of these two crimes in one setting is very challenging. It should only be attempted when the facility can provide a safe and supportive environment and when staff are properly trained to understand the safety, legal, medical, mental health, social, and cultural needs of the victims.
In Memoriam : Norma Hotaling
After overcoming sexual exploitation and drug addictions, Norma Hotaling devoted her life to ending the commercial sex trade in the United States. While she left behind a life of despair, homelessness, addiction, and prostitution, she used her experiences to educate others about the harms of sex trade. She became a passionate leader and was often called on to speak at conferences, counsel public policy experts, and testify before the U.S. Congress and state legislatures. She also addressed foreign audiences as a Department of State-funded speaker.
Ms. Hotaling co-founded the NGO Standing Against Global Exploitation (SAGE) in 1992 to provide resources, advocacy, and counseling for sexually exploited men and women. Her work led to a 2004 California law that allows prosecutors to charge pimps and johns with child abuse if they prostitute a minor.
In 1996, Ms. Hotaling helped the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office create the First Offender Prostitution Program, a unique class for men caught soliciting prostitutes. The initiative allows first offenders to have their charges dropped if they pay a $1,000 fine and participate in a six-hour course taught by sex trafficking experts, neighborhood activists, and doctors who discuss the downsides of prostitution. A 2008 U.S. Department of Justice study lauded the program, concluding that participants were 30 percent less likely than other men to be rearrested for soliciting prostitutes. The program is now replicated in 40 cities.
Ms. Hotaling was committed to demystifying and debunking the romantic notion of prostitution and getting people to understand that the practice treats women and girls as commodities. She worked to reframe prostitution as form of violence against women rather than a job. In 2008, while battling pancreatic cancer, Ms. Hotaling led a successful opposition to legislation that would have decriminalized prostitution in San Francisco.
In a 1997 interview, Ms. Hotaling described her life’s work for The San Francisco Chronicle:
“It’s like caring for orchids. They die so easily. But you take the dead-looking stem to someone who knows orchids and that person can look at the root and say, ‘Look! There’s still a little bit of life here.’”
Ms. Hotaling died in her San Francisco home in December. She was 57.
Forced Labor Costs Considerable : A View from the ILO
The Trafficking in Persons Report in recent years has focused increased attention on labor forms of human trafficking. A newly released ILO report on forced labor in the world – The Cost of Coercion (May 2009) – breaks new ground in assessing the economic impact of forced labor, including the impact of fraudulent recruitment of migrant workers. The report’s release is prescient, coming amidst a global financial crisis that affects a significant share of the world’s migrant work force and underscores the need for much stronger governmental and business community responses to forced labor.
Among the key conclusions of Cost of Coercion:
* Key manifestations of the global forced labor problem continue to be: slavery and abduction for labor; agriculture-based forced labor in rural areas; compulsory work on public projects; bonded labor in South Asia; forced labor exacted by the military – with a special emphasis on “Myanmar” (Burma); and forced labor related to labor migration – the “underside of globalization.”
* Forced labor represents a challenge for virtually every country in the world and is increasingly penetrating supply chains of mainstream companies in the formal economy.
* Forced labor can be induced by a number of means, including psychological (non-physical) coercion; abuse of legal processes – such as the threat of having a migrant detained and deported as an undocumented alien; threats of financial penalties, such as those linked with debts; and the confiscation of identity or travel documents.
* An estimated 8.1 million victims of forced labor in the world today are denied more than $20 billion due to the perpetrators of forced labor. These opportunity costs, or “stolen” wages, are incurred largely in the developing world and most significantly in Asia and the Pacific, which accounts for $8.9 billion, or almost half of forced labor’s costs in the world. As wages denied and not remitted to workers’ home countries, these costs can be viewed as an impediment to economic development.
* Little progress has been made since 2001 in improving data collection on forced labor; the process of estimating the problem “has hardly begun in most countries.” While victimizing far more people than sex trafficking, forced labor is also underrepresented by governments’ law enforcement efforts against human trafficking.
* ILO research has shown a clear relationship between amounts spent by migrant workers during their recruitment and the probability of their becoming victims of forced labor; the higher the cost, the greater the likelihood of forced labor. Excessive and often unlawful recruitment fees are often a key contributing factor to forced labor. Particular attention should be paid to private employment agencies, given their documented role in trafficking for labor exploitation.
* Migrants in the fishing industry or serving as domestic workers are particularly vulnerable to forced labor.
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