US Adds 8 Countries to List of Worst Human Traffickers

The United States added eight more countries Thursday to its blacklist of nations it said are doing the least to end the $150 billion worldwide human trafficking industry.

The U.S. State Department put the former Soviet republics of Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan on the list of its 27 worst offenders, along with the fledgling democracy of Myanmar, Haiti, Djibouti, Papua New Guinea, Sudan and Suriname.

Kuwait and Thailand were moved off the lowest Tier 3 ranking of the annual listing, promoted a higher to a “Tier 2 Watch List” indicating they were making efforts to combat the trade in humans but still under scrutiny. The State Department said that the governments in Libya, Somalia and Yemen were too chaotic to be able to judge their efforts against human trafficking.

Secretary of State John Kerry, in releasing the 16th annual report, said human trafficking remains a major problem in parts of the world, especially sexual slavery involving women and forced, captive labor.

“We’re talking about slavery, modern day slavery of 20 million people,” he said. “These people are forced to endure a living hell that no human being ought to have to endure. It’s stunning, outrageous the magnitude of human trafficking.”

‘She’s not a little girl, she’s a slave’

He recalled the plight of a 12-year-old girl in Syria who was repeatedly raped by an Islamic State fighter even as her mother pleaded for the girl’s attacker to stop. “He just said, ‘She’s not a little girl, she’s a slave.’”

The top U.S. diplomat decried Thai fishing companies that have enslaved workers, keeping them in isolation on the seas to hide abusive treatment of them, and those who keep domestic workers captive and deny them normal freedoms. Kerry said new model contracts have been drawn up to try to prevent the abuse of care givers hired by the world’s wealthiest people.

Thailand moved up the list after its government reported an increase in prosecutions and convictions for trafficking.

But the report said that in neighboring Myanmar, the government continues to coerce men, women, and children into forced labor, while children are recruited into the state armed forces. The State Department said Myanmar’s treatment of minority Rohingya Muslims also increased their vulnerability to trafficking.

 

The U.S. said Uzbekistan was put on Tier 3 list because the Central Asian nation was forcing adults work in the cotton harvest and had made efforts to hide labor violations from independent monitors. [Read More]

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Source: VOA News: Human Rights and Law


 

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