Trafficking in Persons Report 2010
SRI LANKA (Tier 2 Watch List)
Sri Lanka is primarily a source and, to a much lesser extent, a
destination for men and women subjected to trafficking in persons,
specifically forced labor and forced prostitution. Sri Lankan men
and women migrate consensually to Kuwait, Jordan, Saudi Arabia,
Qatar, Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Oman, Bahrain, and
Singapore to work as construction workers, domestic servants, or
garment factory workers. Some of these workers, however,
subsequently find themselves in conditions of forced labor through
practices such as restrictions on movement, withholding of
passports, threats, physical or sexual abuse, and threats of their
detention and deportation for immigration violations. Many of these
migrants pay high recruitment fees – usually about $1,500 – imposed
by licensed labor recruitment agencies and their unlicensed
sub-agents and often assume debt linked to their future work and
income in order to satisfy these costs. This indebtedness
contributes to debt bondage in destination countries. The group
most susceptible to human trafficking is the 1.1 million unskilled
Sri Lankans abroad, most of whom are female domestic workers. An
NGO released a survey in mid-2009 which found that 48 percent of
returned Sri Lankan domestic workers were assaulted by a member of
their employers’ household, 52 percent were not paid the salary
promised to them, and 84 percent were not paid for their overtime
work, abuses that may indicate forced labor. There are also a
number of cases in which some Sri Lankan recruitment agencies
commit fraud by engaging in contract-switching, promising one type
of job and conditions but then changing the job, employer,
conditions or salary after arrival, risk factors for forced labor
and debt bondage. There is evidence of government complicity in
trafficking. Some sub-agents cooperated with Sri Lankan officials
to procure forged or modified documents, or real documents with
false data, to facilitate travel abroad. Some women were promised
jobs as domestic workers in other countries, but after arriving
were instead forced to work in brothels, mainly in Singapore.
According to NGOs, trafficking offenders –possibly members of
loosely affiliated crime groups – sometimes raped these women and
forced them to work in brothels prior to their departure from Sri
Lanka. A small number of Sri Lankan women are forced into
prostitution in the Maldives.
Within the country, women and children are trafficked into
brothels, especially in the Anuradhapura area, which was a major
transit point for members of the Sri Lankan Armed Forces heading
north. Boys are more likely than girls to be forced into
prostitution – this is generally in coastal areas for domestic
child sex tourism. The National Child Protection Authority (NCPA)
estimated that approximately 1,000 children are subjected to
commercial sexual exploitation within Sri Lanka although some NGOs
believe the actual number is between 10,000 and 15,000. Children
are also subjected to bonded labor in dry-zone farming areas and on
plantations, where they were forced to work in fields or in homes
to help pay off loans taken by their parents. Reports indicated
some cases in which children below the age of 12 were kidnapped,
generally by a relative, to work in the fireworks and fish-drying
industries. A small number of women from Thailand, China, and
countries in South Asia, Eastern Europe, and the former Soviet
Union may be subjected to forced prostitution in Sri Lanka.
With the conclusion of the 26-year war with the Liberation Tigers
of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), the government, in partnership with the UN,
identified and demobilized during the reporting period between 400
and 500 child soldiers previously under the control of the LTTE.
According to UNICEF statistics, four child soldiers remained
unaccounted for by March 2010; efforts by the government and the UN
to locate these children were unsuccessful. Allegations of
kidnapping and re-recruitment of children have been made against
some members of the pro-government Tamil Makkal Vidulthalai Pulikal
(TMVP) and other armed groups in the East and North.
Sri Lanka does not fully comply with the minimum standards for the
elimination of trafficking; however, it is making significant
efforts to do so. During the year, the government enacted a law
that facilitates the prosecution of recruitment agencies engaged in
fraudulent recruitment. While the government made little progress
in identifying trafficking victims, it did provide some training on
identification. Despite these overall efforts, including
rehabilitating child soldiers and reintegrating them into their
communities and families the government has not shown evidence of
progress in convicting and punishing trafficking offenders and
identifying and protecting trafficking offenders. Therefore, Sri
Lanka is placed on Tier 2 Watch List for the fourth consecutive
year.
Recommendations for Sri Lanka: Vigorously investigate and
prosecute suspected trafficking offenses and convict and punish
trafficking offenders, particularly those responsible for
recruiting victims with fraudulent offers of employment and
excessive commission fees; develop and implement formal victim
referral procedures; ensure that victims of trafficking found
within Sri Lanka are not detained or otherwise penalized for
unlawful acts committed as a direct result of their being
trafficked, such as visa violations; continue to run trafficking
campaigns aimed at the public and law enforcement; continue to
implement the “zero tolerance” policy regarding the recruitment and
use of child soldiers; ensure that former child soldiers are
reintegrated into society through comprehensive rehabilitation
programs; establish a system to prevent vulnerable children from
being recruited or re-recruited as soldiers; and strengthen the
national anti-trafficking task force.
Prosecution
The Sri Lankan government made some law-enforcement efforts in
addressing human trafficking cases over the reporting period. Sri
Lanka prohibits all forms of trafficking through an April 2006
amendment to its penal code, which prescribes punishments of up to
20 years’ imprisonment. These penalties are sufficiently stringent
and commensurate with those prescribed for other serious offenses,
such as rape. The Sri Lankan Parliament passed a new act in
September 2009 that expanded the powers of the Sri Lanka Bureau of
Foreign Employment (SLBFE) to prosecute recruitment agents who
engage in fraudulent recruitment. The new law, among other things,
prescribes a maximum penalty of four years’ imprisonment and fines
of $1,000 (an average half-year’s salary for Sri Lankans),
restricts the amount that employment agents can charge, requires
government approval for all foreign employment advertisements, and
makes the use of receipts mandatory.
Under the 2006 Anti-Trafficking Amendment, the Attorney General’s
Department initiated two prosecutions during the reporting period,
one under Section 360C (trafficking) and one under 360B (sexual
exploitation of children). Reports indicate that these are the
first two prosecutions under Sri Lanka’s 2006 Amendment, although
the disposition of the 29 arrests made last year under the law are
unknown. The Attorney General’s Department reported three
convictions in magistrate courts under Sections 45C, 451B, and 452
of the Immigrants and Emigrants Act of 2006, which prohibit acts of
human smuggling. Each convict was sentenced to one year in prison.
The government reported that these cases constituted human
trafficking, although this is unconfirmed. One prosecution of a
low-level Sri Lankan official who was involved in document fraud
was dismissed on a technicality. The Ministry of Defense provided
an update on the status of 23 Sri Lankan UN peacekeepers who were
convicted in late 2008 of sexually exploiting and abusing children
while they were stationed in Haiti under UN auspices in 2007.
Twenty peacekeepers had been discharged, demoted, formally
reprimanded, or otherwise punished, and the other three were killed
in military action. It is unclear whether these penalties were
criminal or solely administrative. Eight hundred fifty-nine police
officers participated in trafficking training modules in 2009, and
305 officers received trafficking training in workshops conducted
by previously-trained Sri Lankan police officers. While the
government advertised the new SLBFE law on state media, it did not
provide officials any training on the implementation of this law.
In recent years, the Sri Lanka government claimed that it would
finalize a circular which would advise police on identifying
potential trafficking victims among women detained for
prostitution, as well as a ranking system that would publicly grade
all employment agencies. Neither of these initiatives was completed
in the reporting period.
Protection
The government made limited progress in ensuring that victims of
trafficking received access to necessary services during the year.
The government continued to provide limited counseling and day care
for children – including trafficking victims – through the
operations of six resource centers. The SLBFE ran eight short-term
shelters in Jordan, Kuwait, Libya, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE,
as well as an overnight shelter in Sri Lanka’s international
airport for returning female migrant workers who encountered abuse
abroad. These shelters were funded by fees charged to workers upon
migration. The Commissioner General for Rehabilitation, with the
assistance of the NCPA, continued to operate two rehabilitation
centers specifically for children involved in armed conflict, and
with donor support also ran a vocational training center.
Government personnel did not employ formal procedures for
proactively identifying victims, but various agencies on an ad
hoc basis identified approximately 75 victims in 2009. It is
unknown whether these victims were referred to shelters. At least
two of these victims – Uzbek women who were forced into
prostitution – remain at a transit detention facility for
undocumented migrants as of March 2010. While government officials
indicated that the prolonged detention of the Uzbek women was for
their personal safety and that their presence and testimony was
crucial to ensure the prosecution of their traffickers, the women
were not permitted to leave the detention facility. The government
implemented a “zero tolerance” policy of child recruitment in the
reporting period. Its efforts, in partnership with the UN, to track
and demobilize the child soldiers associated with the LTTE and TMVP
resulted in the release of nearly all child soldiers by the end of
2009. Furthermore, the Sri Lankan government ran two rehabilitation
centers in partnership with UNICEF, which served more than 450
former child soldiers at the end of the reporting period.
The government did not encourage victims to assist in the
investigation and prosecution of trafficking cases. While Sri
Lankan trafficking victims could file administrative cases to seek
financial restitution, this did not happen in practice due to
victim embarrassment and the slow pace of the Sri Lankan legal
system. The government penalized victims of trafficking through
detention for unlawful acts committed as a direct result of their
being trafficked. Most commonly, these acts were violations of
their visa status. All detainees who were awaiting deportation for
these visa violations, including trafficking victims, remained in
detention facilities until they raised enough money to pay for
their plane ticket home; in some cases, detainees have remained in
detention centers for years. The government provided no legal
alternatives for the removal of foreign victims to countries where
they may face hardship or retribution. The National Counter Human
Trafficking Resource Center of the Sri Lanka Department of
Immigration and Emigration conducted two training sessions in
partnership with the IOM since its inauguration in June 2009. The
SLBFE also provided training on protection and assistance to its
staff members who worked at embassies and consulates in foreign
countries. Fifty immigration officers attended training sessions on
the identification of trafficking victims.
Prevention
The Sri Lankan government made progress in its efforts to prevent
trafficking during the last year. The National Child Protective
Authority conducted awareness campaigns to educate the general
public about the dangers of trafficking. The SLBFE conducted public
outreach events to warn people of the dangers of going abroad
illegally and using unlicensed recruitment agencies to find work,
and also required all workers to receive pre-departure training
which included a labor rights component. In measures that could
prevent transnational labor trafficking of Sri Lankans, the
government conducted 184 raids of fraudulent foreign recruiting
agencies and took legal action against 12 of them, resulting in
fines ranging from $200 to $1,000. While most Sri Lankans have
birth certificates and (after the age of 16) national identity
cards, many of the 250,000 to 350,000 internally displaced people –
a group very vulnerable to trafficking – did not have these
documents. The Government of Sri Lanka forged a partnership with
UNDP to conduct 16 mobile documentation clinics for
conflict-affected people, reaching over 29,000 people in 2009.
These clinics were not funded by the Sri Lankan government but
heavily involved official personnel time. The Government of Sri
Lanka did not report any efforts to reduce the demand for
commercial sex acts during the reporting period.
The Ministry of Defense provided training to all Sri Lankan
peacekeepers prior to their deployments for international
peacekeeping missions on their obligations, duties,
responsibilities, and potential disciplinary action, relating to
human rights, including trafficking. Sri Lanka sent 39 delegations
to 22 different labor-receiving countries for meetings, including
discussions on ways to improve the rights and conditions of Sri
Lankan migrant workers. As of March 2010, the Sri Lankan Counter
Trafficking Task Force had not met for at least seven months and
had no full-time staff due to a lack of funding for operations.
While there is informal communication between the interagency
members, the Task Force does not have a proper mandate to ensure a
true interagency process. Sri Lanka is not a party to the 2000 UN
TIP Protocol.
Verknüpfte Dokumente
- Dokument-ID 1122099 Verwandt / Verknüpft
14. Juni 2010 | USDOS – US Department of State (Autor)
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Methodologie zu Bericht zu Menschenhandel 2010
Trafficking in Persons Report 2010 (Periodischer Bericht, Englisch)