1.36M trafficked persons from Asia -- ILO estimates

http://globalnation.inquirer.net/news/breakingnews/view_article.php?article_id=45807
1.36M trafficked persons from Asia -- ILO estimates

By Veronica Uy
INQUIRER.net
Posted date: January 26, 2007

MANILA, Philippines -- More than half the 2.45 million people trafficked
worldwide --or 1.36 million -- are from Asia and the Pacific, with Thailand and
the Philippines facing “serious problems,” the International Labor Organization
(ILO) said.

Thetis Mangahas, chief technical adviser of the ILO’s Mekong project based in
Bangkok, said the organization’s Global Report 2005 shows people from
industrialized countries are not spared from the transnational crime, comprising
the second largest number of victims at 270,000.

Latin America and the Caribbean accounted for 250,000 trafficked persons; the
Middle East and North Africa, 230,000; transition countries, or countries
transforming from former centralized economies to open markets, 200,000; and
sub-Saharan Africa, 130,000.

The typical trafficked person is female, young, poorly educated and with little
skills, and marginalized either as an irregular migrant or a hill tribe
minority.

Most of them, said Mangahas, end up in the entertainment industry, domestic
work, agriculture (mostly on small family farms), fishing (deep-sea and fish
processing), sweatshops (usually small, informal shops that are part of
sub-contracting chains), construction, and even begging.

These workplaces are “often not covered by labor law or policy, small, informal,
isolated with little regulation and supervision, and absent [the right to]
organization and representation,” she said.

In the Philippines and Thailand, lawyer Robert Larga of the ILO in Manila said,
“many women…are lured to the promise of overseas employment but end up in
exploitative situations like prostitution, pornography, other sexual
exploitation and forced or bonded labor.”

While noting government and non-government efforts to enact laws and develop
policies to prevent trafficking, he said a recent ILO study highlighted the need
to extend assistance on reintegration to former victims.

“The lack or inappropriateness of reintegration services contributes to the
problem, making returnees vulnerable to re-trafficking,” he said.

To address this, the ILO launched a $1.9 million project for long-term economic
and social empowerment and providing core social services to human trafficking
victims.

The three-year “Economic and Social Empowerment of Returned Victims of
Trafficking in Thailand and the Philippines” is funded by the Japanese
government through the United Nations Trust Fund for Human Security.

It aims to help reduce trafficking in children and women for sexual and labor
exploitation in Asia through support to a humane return and reintegration
process of victims of trafficking in their countries of origin.