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	Increase in global child trafficking gives cause for concern, says new UN report by UN Office on Drugs and Crime & agencies   The 2012 Global Report on Trafficking in Persons released by UNODC has revealed that 27 per cent of all victims of human trafficking officially detected globally between 2007 and 2010 are children, up 7 per cent from the period 2003 to 2006.   "Human trafficking requires a forceful response founded on the assistance and protection for victims, rigorous enforcement by the criminal justice system, a sound migration policy and firm regulation of the labour markets," said Yury Fedotov, Executive Director of UNODC of the findings.   Also worrying is the increase in the number of girl victims, who make up two thirds of all trafficked children. Girls now constitute 15 to 20 per cent of the total number of all detected victims, including adults, whereas boys comprise about 10 per cent, says the Report, which is based on official data supplied by 132 countries.   Within this picture, there are significant regional variations. While the share of detected child victims is 68 per cent in Africa and the Middle East, and 39 per cent in South Asia, East Asia and the Pacific, that proportion diminishes to 27 per cent in the Americas and 16 per cent in Europe and Central Asia.   The vast majority of trafficked persons are women, accounting for 55 to 60 per cent of victims detected globally. However, the total proportion of women and girls together soars to about 75 per cent, with men constituting about 14 per cent of the total of detected victims. Nonetheless, this is not a uniform picture as one in four detected victims is a male.   Mr. Fedotov acknowledged the current gaps in knowledge about this crime and the need for comprehensive data about offenders, victims and trafficking flows. Still, the number of trafficking victims is estimated to run into the millions.   Victims of 136 countries were detected in 118 countries between 2007 and 2010, during which period, 460 different flows were identified. Around half of all trafficking took place within the same region with 27 per cent occurring within national borders. One exception is the Middle East, where most detected victims are East and South Asians.   Trafficking victims from East Asia have been detected in more than 60 countries, making them the most geographically dispersed group around the world. Victims from the largest number of origin countries were found in Western and Central Europe.   There are significant regional differences in the detected forms of exploitation. Countries in Africa and in Asia generally intercept more cases of trafficking for forced labour, while sexual exploitation is somewhat more frequently found in Europe and in the Americas. Additionally, trafficking for organ removal was detected in 16 countries around the world.   The Report raises concerns about low conviction rates - 16 per cent of reporting countries did not record a single conviction for trafficking in persons between 2007 and 2010.   http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/frontpage/2012/December/increase-in-global-child-trafficking-gives-cause-for-concern-says-new-unodc-report.html?ref=fs1   Jan 2012   Labour Exploitation, Main Reason for Human Trafficking, says IOM Report.   Half of the human trafficking cases brought before IOM for assistance in 2011 involved victims of labour exploitation according to IOM’s first report on counter trafficking and assistance to vulnerable migrants.   The report which looked into human trafficking trends in 2011, by way of assistance, collected information from more than 150 IOM Missions.   During the period, IOM provided assistance to some 3,014 victims of labour exploitation, which represents a 53% of all recorded instances of assistance sought by victims of human trafficking.   By contrast, only 27% of the cases assisted by IOM involved trafficking for sexual exploitation.   Since 2010, labour trafficking has overtaken sexual exploitation as the main type of trafficking, seen in cases assisted by IOM. IOM keeps the world’s largest case level statistics on human trafficking.   Labour trafficking is a feature of many economic sectors, particularly those requiring manual labour such as agri¬culture, construction, domestic work, fisheries, and mining. In many cases, the exploitation takes place under the guise of legal and contractual work, but with degrading conditions of work which are different from the promises given to the workers.   Though assistance to female victims of trafficking has remained fairly on the same level as that of 2008, the report says there has been an increase of demand for assistance from male victims of trafficking from 1,656 individuals in 2008 to 2,040 in 2011.   Women however, says the report, continue to represent the majority of trafficked persons receiving IOM assistance, making up nearly two thirds (62%) of cases assisted by IOM. This includes cases involving sexual exploitation, labour exploitation, and a combination of sexual and labour exploitation.   During the 2011 period IOM provided help to around 2,700 trafficked and exploited migrants, the majority, 835, were Ukrainians.   The figure shows a decline of seven percent in assisted cases, compared with the number of persons assisted in 2010. The decline is attributed to external factors rather than being a reflection of the actual drop in cases of human trafficking.   The main countries of destination for human trafficking victims according to the report are the Russian Federation, Haiti, Yemen, Thailand and Kazakhstan. Top countries of origin were named by the report as Ukraine, Haiti, Yemen, Laos, Uzbekistan and Cambodia.   IOM provides a wide range of assistance to victims of human trafficking including legal and medical assistance, voluntary return , reintegration assistance , protection and shelter prior to voluntary repatriation.   http://www.iom.int/cms/en/sites/iom/home/news-and-views/press-briefing-notes/pbn-2012/pbn-listing/labour-exploitation-main-reason.html   December 31, 2012   How Many Slaves Work for You?, by Louis Masur. (New York Times)   The Emancipation Proclamation, signed 150 years ago today, was a revolutionary achievement, and widely recognized as such at the time. Abraham Lincoln himself declared, “If my name goes into history it will be for this act, and my whole soul is in it.”   On New Year’s Eve, 1862, “watch-night” services in auditoriums, churches, camps and cabins united thousands, free as well as enslaved, who sang, prayed and counted down to midnight. At a gathering of runaway slaves in Washington, a man named Thornton wept: “Tomorrow my child is to be sold never more.”   The Day of Jubilee, as Jan. 1, 1863 was called, arrived at last and celebrations of deliverance and freedom commenced. “We are all liberated by this proclamation,” Frederick Douglass observed. “The white man is liberated, the black man is liberated.” The Fourth of July “was great,” he proclaimed, “but the First of January, when we consider it in all its relations and bearings, even greater.”   Yet the day never took hold as Emancipation Day, an occasion to commemorate freedom for all Americans. Nearly three years would pass before the ratification of the 13th Amendment officially abolished slavery. All too quickly, the joy of emancipation succumbed to the reality of a circumscribed freedom in which blacks found themselves the victims of economic injustice and racial discrimination.   Settling on a single day to celebrate emancipation was further complicated by the variety of dates on which actual freedom, or word of it, came to the slaves: for example, slavery ended on April 16, 1862 in Washington, but it didn’t come to Virginia until April 3, 1865; word of the war’s end and emancipation didn’t reach Texas until June 19, 1865, a day celebrated as “Juneteenth.” Some areas marked Feb. 1, 1865, when Lincoln signed the joint resolution approving the 13th Amendment. As a result, local traditions took the place of a nationwide anniversary.   But those local traditions don’t preclude a national observation. Indeed, today’s sesquicentennial of the Emancipation Proclamation provides an opportunity to observe Jan. 1 as a day of emancipation and to rededicate ourselves to freedom. In 1963, standing before the Lincoln Memorial, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. labeled the Proclamation a “beacon light of hope” to African-Americans and used the centennial to call for a renewed commitment to civil rights in America. Fifty years later, we might consider what a new Emancipation Proclamation would look like, one written for our times.   It would, above all, focus American and international attention on the millions of people still held in servitude. In September, the Frederick Douglass Family Foundation, an organization devoted to securing personal freedom and rights for all individuals, began a project called 100 Days to Freedom. Students in schools across the country were invited to craft a New Proclamation of Freedom, which the foundation hopes will be signed by President Obama on Jan. 11, which is recognized worldwide as Human Trafficking Awareness Day.   In the United States, thousands are held against their will; minors, especially, are the victims of ruthless exploitation. While other countries are worse offenders, the United States, according to State Department reports, serves as both a source and a destination for the trafficking of children.   In a speech delivered in September at the Clinton Global Initiative, President Obama declared that the time had come to call human trafficking by its rightful name: modern slavery. “The bitter truth is that trafficking also goes on right here, in the United States,” he declared. “It’s the migrant worker unable to pay off the debt to his trafficker. The man, lured here with the promise of a job, his documents then taken, and forced to work endless hours in a kitchen. The teenage girl, beaten, forced to walk the streets. This should not be happening in the United States of America.”   That same month the president signed an executive order that stated the United States would “lead by example” and take steps to ensure that federal contracts are not awarded to companies or nations implicated in trafficking. “We’re making clear that American tax dollars must never, ever be used to support the trafficking of human beings,” he said.   Still, the invisibility of modern slavery makes it all the more pernicious and difficult to eradicate. The organization Slavery Footprint asks on its Web site, “How many slaves work for you?” A survey poses a series of seemingly innocuous questions such as what do you eat, what do you wear, what medicine do you take, and what electronics do you use? Upon completion, a number is revealed: I discovered that 60 slaves work for me — cutting the tropical wood for my furniture, harvesting the Central Asian cotton in my shirts or mining the African precious metals used in my electronics.   One way to reduce our complicity and attack human trafficking is to participate in Made in a Free World, a platform started by Slavery Footprint to show companies how to eliminate forced labor from their supply chains. A smartphone app also allows consumers to identify items made by forced labor and send letters to the manufacturers, demanding that they investigate the origins of the raw materials used in their products.   At his speech condemning human trafficking, President Obama referred to Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation as having “brought a new day — that ‘all persons held as slaves’ would thenceforth be forever free. We wrote that promise into our Constitution. We spent decades struggling to make it real.”   Today we should celebrate the extraordinary moment in the nation’s history when slavery yielded to freedom. But the work must continue. For those who insist they would have been abolitionists during the Civil War, now is the chance to become one.   * Louis P. Masur is a professor of American studies and history at Rutgers University and the author of “Lincoln’s Hundred Days: The Emancipation Proclamation and the War for the Union.” http://slaveryfootprint.org/
	Forced marriage leads to life time in slavery by Gulnara Shahinian Special Rapporteur on Contemporary forms of Slavery   “Women and girls who are forced to marry find themselves in servile marriages for the rest of their lives,” warned United Nations Special Rapporteur on Contemporary forms of Slavery, Gulnara Shahinian, on the International Day for the Abolition of Slavery. “They are deprived of their genuine right to make their own choice for their future.”   “As if this is not bad enough these women and girls experience, sometimes daily, other human rights violations such as domestic servitude and sexual slavery, and suffer from violations to their right to health, education, non-discrimination and freedom from physical, psychological and sexual violence,” Ms. Shahinian stressed, quoting her 2012 report* to the UN General Assembly on servile marriages.   Non-consensual marriages, sale of wives and wife inheritance are forms of servile marriages which reduce a spouse to a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised. The 1956 UN Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, the Slave Trade, and Institutions and Practices Similar to Slavery clearly defines them as slavery practices, and international law has further reiterated and reinforced the provisions within the Convention that prohibit forced marriages in adults and children.   “Nothing can justify these forms of slavery; not traditional, religious, cultural, economic or even security considerations,” the human rights expert underscored, noting that, over the years, the idea that forced marriages are forms of slavery and, therefore, servile marriages has been lost, while non-consensual marriages, sale of wives and wife inheritance still occur.   For the UN Special Rapporteur, reaffirming forced marriages as slavery-like practices “moves the discussion from being just about the rights of women and girls to also being about abolishing slavery within communities.” In her view, it provides an understanding of the violations that victims endure and the kind of interventions required to prevent, monitor and prosecute servile marriage, and helps tailor victim protection programmes to specifically support victims of servile marriages.   “As with all forms of slavery, in order to tackle this problem head on, servile marriages should be criminalized,” Ms. Shahinian said. “However, it is important to note that an approach which only focuses on criminalization cannot succeed in effectively combating servile marriages.”   Such legislation, the rights expert stressed, should go hand in hand with community programmes to help detect, provide advice, rehabilitation, education and shelter where necessary. Programmes and policies should also ensure the equal access to education for girls reinforced by mandatory measures to ensure that girls go to school. Public awareness raising campaigns should be implemented to highlight the nature and harm caused by forced and early marriages.   “Women and girls should not be forced to marry. Women and girls should not be forced to spend their life time in slavery. Nothing can justify that,” Ms. Shahinian said.   * Gulnara Shahinian was appointed as the first Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery, its causes and consequences in May 2008. Visit the related web page
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