Trafficking in Persons Report 2011
4:30 P.M. EDT
MODERATOR: Good afternoon and thank you all for joining us at the Foreign Press Center. We are joined today by Ambassador CdeBaca. Without further ado, I am going to turn the floor over to him. I just ask, however, that if you have any electronic devices that you please switch them either to the silent or off positions at this time. And please remember that during the question-and-answer period to please state your name and media organization.
And without further ado, Ambassador.
AMBASSADOR CDEBACA: Good afternoon, everybody. About two hours ago, Secretary Clinton and I unveiled the 11th version of the Trafficking in Persons Report, which is here. The Trafficking in Persons Report is the annual snapshot of the situation around the globe in particular countries on the contemporary fight against all forms of slavery. This is a problem that – from which no country is immune, including the United States. The report, for the second year in a row, includes the American situation with recommendations for improvement and how to confront this problem here at home.
But we also see this report as a call for partnerships with our friends in other countries. The notion that in a world in which globalization has made it so much easier for the traffickers to operate, the only way to confront this transnational crime threat is for governments to work together, not just to work together as partners in mutual legal assistance or extradition or things like that, but to work together to identify the best practices around the globe, to create a set of standards that all countries should follow, not just because it’s the politically expedient thing to do, because it is the right thing to do.
Some very quick facts about the 2011 TIP report: This year, there were 184 countries included in the report, which is the largest number so far. Of those, 181 were actually ranked. Three countries were listed as special case status, which is Cote d'Ivoire, Haiti, and Somalia, those countries, where both because of natural and political instability, the governments are not functioning at a level that would allow us to actually analyze them.
The distribution across the tiers: As you may know, there are four tiers in the report. Tier 1, a country that is meeting the minimum standards for action against this crime, there are 32 countries. Tier 2, countries that are seeking to and working towards meeting those standards but have not yet made it to that level, there are 85 countries. Tier 2 watch list, which is the countries that are working only haltingly, perhaps only have promises of actions but have not been able to deliver, there are 41 countries. And then on Tier 3, the most egregious tier, there are now 23 countries. This is an increase from prior years. And we see this as a toughening of the standards this year. At the end of the day, we see some movement among the countries, but a lot of what we see is a flattening out of the number of cases that are being identified, the number of victims that are being helped.
There are a couple of themes, very quickly, that I’d want to identify. One of them is that legal migration does not mean safe migration. One of the things that we’re seeing more and more of is people who are emigrating through official channels, not just as illegal immigrants, who are then somehow exploited. Of course, this is not simply a crime that happens to migrants. It is a crime that also happens to people in their own countries. It is a crime that happens to people who have not moved even a mile from their homes that they’ve been in. But so often, this is a vulnerability that is exploited because of immigration.
We have certainly seen the exposure of labor trafficking through legal means in the wake of the Arab Spring, especially as up to 3 million South Asian workers, guest workers, were found to have been in Libya, many of them abandoned at the time of the recent events, many of whom who have gone home only to face retaliation from labor brokers, loan sharks, and others for whom they owe a debt, reporting that when they were in Libya, their passports had been confiscated, that their – they had been confined to the factories or other worksites. Unfortunately, we think that that’s probably not unique in the region, and it’s something that we want to spend more time looking at this problem of migrant labor through guest worker problems.
Finally, the other thing that this year’s report brings forward in a new way is the idea of individual responsibility to fight against this problem of modern slavery. Rather than simply thinking that the nongovernmental organizations are responsible to care for the victims on the one hand, and that the governments are responsible to investigate the cases and prosecute the traffickers on the other hand, this year’s report challenges individual citizens of the world to act, to look at what they are buying, to look at how they behave in their personal life, so that we can start to undercut the demand for whether it’s cheap goods, whether it’s commercial sex, all of these things that the traffickers rush to meet through cruelty and exploitation.
One often hears about the notion of a carbon footprint that people can and should offset, that notion of riding the bike to work to make up for the fact that you flew in an airplane the day before, as an offset. This is something that I think we are going to be hearing more of from us in the coming years, which is saying individual people, individual consumers need to be thinking about the, quote, unquote, “slavery footprint” that they themselves have in the world.
And what does that mean? Well, as you’ll see in the introduction to the report, that can mean everything from the clothes that we wear – much of the cotton in many of the clothes that people wear around the world was picked by children who were exploited in the Central Asian republics. Much of the cocoa that’s in the chocolate that we eat or the cocoa that we drink was picked by enslaved children in places like Cote d’Ivoire or Ghana. In Europe, most of the whitefish that anyone would eat is something that has been caught by people who are being exploited in Lake Volta area, Lake Victoria, and other parts of Africa. And so that notion that consumers need to start asking those questions, individuals need to start looking at the maid next door and see if she is needing that kind of help, all of that personal responsibility.
So again, this year’s report does not let governments off the hook, as we call for increased personal responsibility. But one of the calls that was made today and is made in the pages of this book is very much that governments cannot do this alone; it will take a cultural as well as a structural and governmental change to end slavery in the modern era.
There are a few quick other things that perhaps we can do in the Q&A period, but I’d like to also call attention to the fact that Secretary Clinton honored a number of people who have, through their actions in their home countries and otherwise, proven themselves to be acclaimed as trafficking heroes. Those people, from countries such as Bosnia-Herzegovina, Guatemala, Finland, India, Namibia, Nepal, the Philippines, Singapore, and others – these are people who have put themselves at risk. They’ve put their careers, sometimes, at risk. They’ve sometimes stood up to the traffickers. Whether a survivor, a government official, or a nongovernmental activist, people who span the globe but are united by one controlling idea, and that is that in the year 2011 slavery should exist nowhere in the world.
You’re going to have a chance to, I think, hear from and, in fact perhaps, do some one-on-ones, those of you who are here in Washington, with those TIP heroes, and we’re very happy that they were able to come for this event today at the State Department. I think probably the best thing to do is to open it up for some questions.
MODERATOR: Okay. And we’ll start with the gentleman in the back.
QUESTION: How you are doing, Ambassador? Thank you for being here. And my name is Jose Diaz with the Reforma Newspaper from Mexico. And I understand very well the difference between the trafficking in persons and human smuggling, but still it’s very surprising that the report doesn’t include any type of mention in the Mexico chapter regarding these tragic events of mass kidnappings of immigrants bound to the U.S. In 2010, one of the most difficult moments in life in Mexico was – is finding 72 immigrants murdered in San Fernando. There are many reports that the drug trafficking organizations are forcing these people to become hit-men for them.
So, today, for example, there’s a report that 60 immigrants have been kidnapped in the train – in the state of Veracruz bound to the U.S., plus other massacres earlier this year. Why does the report doesn’t include not even the mention of the death of 72 people last year? Are you just caving to the pressure of the Mexican Government for not mentioning any type of critique or it’s just that you were oblivious of that or what happened?
AMBASSADOR CDEBACA: We were anything but oblivious to that particular case and many others like them, but there are other such cases in countries around the world that also are not in the report, for the very reason that you mention at the top of your question, the difference between alien smuggling on the one hand, even if it’s done in a violent way or with an extortionate element to it, which is certainly one of things that we’ve seen, and then on the other hand the notion of trafficking in persons, or works perhaps better in Spanish, slavery.
I think that some of the confusion sometimes stems, of course, just from the word itself, which seems to imply movement. Obviously, in Spanish, when you’re dealing with (in Spanish) as opposed to (in Spanish) was a lot easier if we actually just call it – as Secretary Clinton says, let’s just call it what it is. It’s slavery, pure and simple. I think that once you switch over to the conception of this as a problem of (in Spanish) or (in Spanish) it changes the way that we inquire into it. And so while our government – not through my office, but through other parts of the government – whether it’s those that deal with international law enforcement or human rights issues, is calling the attention of people to these types of cases, it’s only when the migrants are held for labor, for services, for prostitution that it ends up coming under the definition, both in international law, U.S. law, and Mexican law. And so that’s the reason why those cases are not in them.
We’ve seen those types of cases in the United States as well, this extortion that happens, and we’ve very committed to working with our Mexican counterparts to try to protect the migrants, whether it’s from slavery, which is my job and what’s in the report on the one hand, and from other social ills as well.
QUESTION: Thanks, Ambassador. Can you tell us about Colombia and Venezuela – excuse me. Martha Avila, TV Colombia. Can you tell us about Colombia and Venezuela?
AMBASSADOR CDEBACA: Well, one of the things that we continue to see with Colombia is that because Colombia has a very proactive form of doing law enforcement, learned through many of the other areas of policing and dealing with disorder over the last 20 years, that Colombia ends up being pretty successful in dealing with this fast-changing area of the law.
Let me explain what I mean by that. If people wait for trafficking victims to come to them and formally enter a (in Spanish), which I think that’s – we definitely have that in Mexico, I think that in – maybe not so much in Colombia – in so much of Latin America, we see this requirement that the triggering effect has to be the trafficking victim coming forward. And what we know is that if the trafficker has done his job, the trafficking victim thinks that the price of coming forward is that their family will be killed or that they themselves will be hurt, or even that they think maybe no one will believe them. So there are all of these impediments to the victim coming forward.
What we’ve seen in Colombia is because of using other proactive law enforcement for the fight against the narco-traffickers and others, because of switching over to the adversarial trials with oral advocacy as opposed to the paper trail, it seems to be translating into results. And so this last year, we saw 144 investigations in trafficking in Colombia. This is – stands out in the entire area.
But that’s not why Colombia’s on Tier 1. At the end of the day, I think that one of the reasons why Colombia is on Tier 1 is because the integration of prosecution and prevention – the national call center in Colombia is actually integrated into the police so that when somebody calls in, it’s not just that you take that person and you give them to the church to care for; rather, it’s actually more of a seamless transition. That’s a very cutting-edge technique, and it’s something that we’d like to see in other parts of Latin America and, frankly, in other parts of the world.
You asked also about Venezuela. Venezuela fell this year. We had seen Venezuela in prior years up on the Tier 2, on the watch list, and that was something that we thought was a positive trend. We were disappointed this last year to see that trend reverse itself with less work being done. Now, there’s a new comprehensive law that’s before the Venezuelan congress that we hope that it will pass and we hope that it will reverse this trend. But until it does it – and of course, we can’t give credit for that type of thing.
I think the biggest problem that we see there is that there’s no real mechanism to identify victims. And while there is a hotline it just – it functions sporadically. People might call it and nobody answers. So we’d like to see the efforts in Venezuela rise up to the same level as we have in many other countries in the region.
MODERATOR: Okay. We’re going to go to New York. New York, go ahead, please.
QUESTION: My name is Sezai Kalayci, and I work with Zaman Turkish Daily Newspaper. My question is, I’m wondering about the Iraq and Afghanistan. What’s these two countries’ situation on the human trafficking? Thank you.
AMBASSADOR CDEBACA: One of the things that we saw this last year about Iraq is that the – with the formation of the government, the time is right for action. And so the Government of Iraq has now issued a action plan, which has, at its core, the passage of modern anti-trafficking legislation. At the end of the day, what we think that that will do is it will make it so the protections for trafficking victims exist in the entire country rather than only in the north. This is something that we’ve seen in recent years, is that the only parts of Iraq where cases are actually being investigated and prosecuted are in the northern part of the country. So what we’re hoping that with this passage of the law, which we expect and which we will work with the Iraqi parliament on in the coming months, that we’ll be able to see those cases being done no matter what part of the country the victims find themselves.
Yes?
QUESTION: Rodney Jaleci from ABS-CBN, Philippines. The Philippines was taken off the Tier 2 watch list. May we know what were the biggest factors that contributed to the improvement of the Philippine standing, and what more does it – does the government need to do to maybe move up to another tier, higher tier? Thank you.
AMBASSADOR CDEBACA: Well, I like that kind of a question, because I think it’s the – that’s the spirit that has seen countries move up. I mean, think about it. In the year 2000, 2001, Bosnia was almost open for business as far as the traffickers were concerned. The Albanian Mafia, people coming in at the end of the war – they were on Tier 3 for a long time. Now they’re on Tier 1. Fuji has gone from Tier 3 two years ago all the way to Tier 2 this year because of what they are doing. So a country that makes that decision doesn’t just say we’re willing to move up a little bit; it wants to aim for the highest tier. We think that that’s exactly what everyone should do, with the understanding that Tier 1 is not a reprieve. It doesn’t mean you have a problem; it means you have a responsibility to act.
Specifically though, as far as what the Philippines has done, I think that there are a number of factors if you look at the application of the minimum standards, whether that’s the breaking of the backlog by the edict that came out from the supreme court that actually has had the result of fast-tracking trafficking in persons cases – there’s a big backlog on all sorts of cases in the Philippines, but breaking the backlog and moving up this critical human rights violation so that it gets done more quickly – that’s made a big difference.
I think that the work to assist victims abroad and help get them home that we see in the consulates from around the world, the commitment of the ambassadors around the world, and a willingness to look at corruption issues, whether it’s with the arrests of certain folks on border guards and at the airport and other things, a very good structure with the ICATS (ph), the inner-ministerial body that’s chaired by the vice president and the attorney general – all of those are factors, but I think that they all really just describe one phenomenon, which is political will.
We’ve seen out of not just President Aquino but from the Philippines – the people of the Philippines a desire to stop this, whether a Filipino’s at home or whether they’re abroad. And I think that there’s just a culture now in the Philippines that says it’s time to fight this problem. I know that one of our anti-trafficking heroes, one of the women who’s leading the fight, is here, and perhaps she’ll be able to – when she has her turn, you’ll be able to ask her a little bit more. But this is an example that I think other countries would be wise to look at. Just as Colombia has best practices to aspire to, the journey that the Philippines is taking is a very impressive one right now.
MODERATOR: All right. We have time for just a few more questions.
AMBASSADOR CDEBACA: Yes, please.
QUESTION: Thank you, Mr. Ambassador. I’d like to begin by asking your apology, because in the previous story I corrected what I thought was a typo, the spelling of your name. Anyway, my question is a follow-up to that.
MODERATOR: Before you begin, can you please state your name and news organization?
QUESTION: Oh. My name is Jenny Ilustre, Malaya, Philippine English Daily. My question has to do with now that the Philippines is off the Tier 2 watch list, please explain to us its impact on the MCC grant, which is now under implementation.
AMBASSADOR CDEBACA: Well, I’m going to take that as a two-part question. The first thing that I’m going to say is for all of those of you who are writing either in Spanish or Tagalog, feel free to use my real name, which is (in Spanish.) (Laughter.) Happy to have that used. The reason it looks like a misspelling is because the C.deBaca that my family has used for the last 100 years or so here in America didn’t work with the State Department email system – (laughter) – because the punto, the period, is now evidently something for the computers, so that’s why the weird spelling of my last name. But please, call me any of the variations that you’d like to.
As far as the MCC is concerned, I mean, I really would want to leave that to the MCC, as far exactly how it weighs that. But certainly it’s the falling to Tier 3, which is something that the MCC takes into account, and takes into account very negatively. I think that the MCC correctly feels that Tier 3 countries are ones in which rule of law is not available to the most vulnerable, which, of course, is one of the pillars of the compacts themselves, is to be making sure that the most vulnerable parts of society have access to justice, have access to court, have access to being made whole for what was done to them. Now, these are steps. They’re steps in the right direction, but they certainly don’t mean that everyone’s out of the woods yet.
I think that Ambassador Thomas said at the prosecutor training last week that now is not the time to get out the champagne, because the difference between 15 and 25 cases is a beginning rather than a culmination. And I think he’s correct, but I think that a little bit of champagne is also in order, because I think that this represents a lot of hard work by a lot of people. The secret now with the Philippines is going to be sustaining and even intensifying this approach.
Yes, please.
QUESTION: Hi. I’m Jim from The Straits Times Newspaper of Singapore. This report is in its eleventh year, and I was wondering, going ahead, what sort of changes do you see needing to make in order to become more effective. As the Secretary mentioned, more prosecutions have become static in sort of recent years, and she said that a measure of success can no longer be whether a country has passed laws. So I was wondering in that regard how – what sort of reforms going ahead do you see?
And if I may, just one quick question on Singapore as well. It was taken off the watch list. Going ahead, what are your expectations of what they should do next, the main thing they need to do next?
AMBASSADOR CDEBACA: Exactly. Well, those two are actually, I think, very well related, those questions. For countries that don’t yet have modern anti-trafficking laws, of course, everything she said about if you have a law that’s not enough, we still have countries that don’t have laws, and we need to work with those countries, and we stand ready to work with them as colleagues.
I certainly know from being a prosecutor in the years when we were trying to use our old laws versus when we were using our modern laws how much of a difference that made, not just for me in court but also for the victims, because the good law is not simply a prosecution law. The good law has contained in it the victim’s protections, the notion that it take a while for a victim to be able to process what happened them, to start becoming a survivor, and at that point be able to help with the investigation, but even better, to get on with their life. So a good law is not simply a prosecution law.
Having said that, one of the things that we see, I think especially in former – in commonwealth countries, is that there are some countries, both in ASEAN and the SAARC regions, that are maintaining an approach to trafficking in persons that was the cutting-edge approach that the British Empire took around the world in the 1880s, and that was laws which mainly focus upon the movement of women for prostitution across international borders. If that is what trafficking is defined in or defined as by a country, they are out of step with the United Nations definitions, which focus much more on the exploitation of the worker.
So that notion of this as a slavery problem rather than as a movement of prostitutes problem or a movement of people problem – this is one of the things that we were very intrigued by with the Government of Singapore in the recent months, when they announced that even though they have not yet acceded to the Palermo Protocol, the United Nations protocol, and they were going to be studying whether they should sign on, that they have now issued a directive to their police to start using the Palermo definition nonetheless when looking at whether or not somebody’s a victim. And I think that even just that change in focus between is this a migrant prostitute versus is this a potential trafficking victim is going to have a real impact.
The other thing that the Government of Singapore did that caught my attention, so much so that I’m carrying it around with me, is issued to police officers a little card that actually has the indicators of trafficking in persons. Rather than waiting for that victim to come to you and say “I’m a trafficking victim,” instead it’s questions that the police officers are supposed to ask of themselves, like, “Is the victim in possession of identification and travel documents? If not, who has them? Have they been threatened with deportation or law enforcement? Can they freely contact their friends or families? Is their salary being garnished to pay off a smuggling fee? Do they have freedom of movement?”
These types of things, I think, change the dynamic, because then it’s not up to the individual cop in Singapore to know all of these fancy definitions. All they have to know is to remember – I mean, if I can carry this – and I lose things all the time – (laughter) – if I can carry this around, and I don’t even work in Singapore, than certainly Singaporean police will be able to do this. It’s that kind of innovation that was lacking over the previous decade in Singapore. The fact that Singapore is exhibiting a political will to show this kind of innovation over the last six months is a very positive thing, I think for the entire ASEAN region.
I’ll be going to Singapore on – I leave next week, on the first trip after the report comes out, and Singapore will be one of the countries that I’m going to, and I’ll be meeting, not just with the Singaporeans but with prosecutors and others from around ASEAN. And I think one of the things that we’re hoping is that we’ll be able to share a lot of these innovations. In fact, one of the innovations is that invited to this ASEAN conference are some other countries, such as Nigeria, where they’ve made up for lack of resources by having an innovative structure that brings police and social workers together.
So that’s something that I think that is a very positive thing coming out of Singapore just in the last six months, is a change towards the international standards. I think that’s going to have results on the ground within the year, because when the Singaporean police decide to do something, they tend to go out and do it.
MODERATOR: Okay. We are going to have to break there. And part two of our briefing will begin momentarily.
# # #
4:30 P.M. EDT
THE WASHINGTON FOREIGN PRESS CENTER, WASHINGTON, D.C.
MODERATOR: Good afternoon and thank you all for joining us at the Foreign Press Center. We are joined today by Ambassador CdeBaca. Without further ado, I am going to turn the floor over to him. I just ask, however, that if you have any electronic devices that you please switch them either to the silent or off positions at this time. And please remember that during the question-and-answer period to please state your name and media organization.
And without further ado, Ambassador.
AMBASSADOR CDEBACA: Good afternoon, everybody. About two hours ago, Secretary Clinton and I unveiled the 11th version of the Trafficking in Persons Report, which is here. The Trafficking in Persons Report is the annual snapshot of the situation around the globe in particular countries on the contemporary fight against all forms of slavery. This is a problem that – from which no country is immune, including the United States. The report, for the second year in a row, includes the American situation with recommendations for improvement and how to confront this problem here at home.
But we also see this report as a call for partnerships with our friends in other countries. The notion that in a world in which globalization has made it so much easier for the traffickers to operate, the only way to confront this transnational crime threat is for governments to work together, not just to work together as partners in mutual legal assistance or extradition or things like that, but to work together to identify the best practices around the globe, to create a set of standards that all countries should follow, not just because it’s the politically expedient thing to do, because it is the right thing to do.
Some very quick facts about the 2011 TIP report: This year, there were 184 countries included in the report, which is the largest number so far. Of those, 181 were actually ranked. Three countries were listed as special case status, which is Cote d'Ivoire, Haiti, and Somalia, those countries, where both because of natural and political instability, the governments are not functioning at a level that would allow us to actually analyze them.
The distribution across the tiers: As you may know, there are four tiers in the report. Tier 1, a country that is meeting the minimum standards for action against this crime, there are 32 countries. Tier 2, countries that are seeking to and working towards meeting those standards but have not yet made it to that level, there are 85 countries. Tier 2 watch list, which is the countries that are working only haltingly, perhaps only have promises of actions but have not been able to deliver, there are 41 countries. And then on Tier 3, the most egregious tier, there are now 23 countries. This is an increase from prior years. And we see this as a toughening of the standards this year. At the end of the day, we see some movement among the countries, but a lot of what we see is a flattening out of the number of cases that are being identified, the number of victims that are being helped.
There are a couple of themes, very quickly, that I’d want to identify. One of them is that legal migration does not mean safe migration. One of the things that we’re seeing more and more of is people who are emigrating through official channels, not just as illegal immigrants, who are then somehow exploited. Of course, this is not simply a crime that happens to migrants. It is a crime that also happens to people in their own countries. It is a crime that happens to people who have not moved even a mile from their homes that they’ve been in. But so often, this is a vulnerability that is exploited because of immigration.
We have certainly seen the exposure of labor trafficking through legal means in the wake of the Arab Spring, especially as up to 3 million South Asian workers, guest workers, were found to have been in Libya, many of them abandoned at the time of the recent events, many of whom who have gone home only to face retaliation from labor brokers, loan sharks, and others for whom they owe a debt, reporting that when they were in Libya, their passports had been confiscated, that their – they had been confined to the factories or other worksites. Unfortunately, we think that that’s probably not unique in the region, and it’s something that we want to spend more time looking at this problem of migrant labor through guest worker problems.
Finally, the other thing that this year’s report brings forward in a new way is the idea of individual responsibility to fight against this problem of modern slavery. Rather than simply thinking that the nongovernmental organizations are responsible to care for the victims on the one hand, and that the governments are responsible to investigate the cases and prosecute the traffickers on the other hand, this year’s report challenges individual citizens of the world to act, to look at what they are buying, to look at how they behave in their personal life, so that we can start to undercut the demand for whether it’s cheap goods, whether it’s commercial sex, all of these things that the traffickers rush to meet through cruelty and exploitation.
One often hears about the notion of a carbon footprint that people can and should offset, that notion of riding the bike to work to make up for the fact that you flew in an airplane the day before, as an offset. This is something that I think we are going to be hearing more of from us in the coming years, which is saying individual people, individual consumers need to be thinking about the, quote, unquote, “slavery footprint” that they themselves have in the world.
And what does that mean? Well, as you’ll see in the introduction to the report, that can mean everything from the clothes that we wear – much of the cotton in many of the clothes that people wear around the world was picked by children who were exploited in the Central Asian republics. Much of the cocoa that’s in the chocolate that we eat or the cocoa that we drink was picked by enslaved children in places like Cote d’Ivoire or Ghana. In Europe, most of the whitefish that anyone would eat is something that has been caught by people who are being exploited in Lake Volta area, Lake Victoria, and other parts of Africa. And so that notion that consumers need to start asking those questions, individuals need to start looking at the maid next door and see if she is needing that kind of help, all of that personal responsibility.
So again, this year’s report does not let governments off the hook, as we call for increased personal responsibility. But one of the calls that was made today and is made in the pages of this book is very much that governments cannot do this alone; it will take a cultural as well as a structural and governmental change to end slavery in the modern era.
There are a few quick other things that perhaps we can do in the Q&A period, but I’d like to also call attention to the fact that Secretary Clinton honored a number of people who have, through their actions in their home countries and otherwise, proven themselves to be acclaimed as trafficking heroes. Those people, from countries such as Bosnia-Herzegovina, Guatemala, Finland, India, Namibia, Nepal, the Philippines, Singapore, and others – these are people who have put themselves at risk. They’ve put their careers, sometimes, at risk. They’ve sometimes stood up to the traffickers. Whether a survivor, a government official, or a nongovernmental activist, people who span the globe but are united by one controlling idea, and that is that in the year 2011 slavery should exist nowhere in the world.
You’re going to have a chance to, I think, hear from and, in fact perhaps, do some one-on-ones, those of you who are here in Washington, with those TIP heroes, and we’re very happy that they were able to come for this event today at the State Department. I think probably the best thing to do is to open it up for some questions.
MODERATOR: Okay. And we’ll start with the gentleman in the back.
QUESTION: How you are doing, Ambassador? Thank you for being here. And my name is Jose Diaz with the Reforma Newspaper from Mexico. And I understand very well the difference between the trafficking in persons and human smuggling, but still it’s very surprising that the report doesn’t include any type of mention in the Mexico chapter regarding these tragic events of mass kidnappings of immigrants bound to the U.S. In 2010, one of the most difficult moments in life in Mexico was – is finding 72 immigrants murdered in San Fernando. There are many reports that the drug trafficking organizations are forcing these people to become hit-men for them.
So, today, for example, there’s a report that 60 immigrants have been kidnapped in the train – in the state of Veracruz bound to the U.S., plus other massacres earlier this year. Why does the report doesn’t include not even the mention of the death of 72 people last year? Are you just caving to the pressure of the Mexican Government for not mentioning any type of critique or it’s just that you were oblivious of that or what happened?
AMBASSADOR CDEBACA: We were anything but oblivious to that particular case and many others like them, but there are other such cases in countries around the world that also are not in the report, for the very reason that you mention at the top of your question, the difference between alien smuggling on the one hand, even if it’s done in a violent way or with an extortionate element to it, which is certainly one of things that we’ve seen, and then on the other hand the notion of trafficking in persons, or works perhaps better in Spanish, slavery.
I think that some of the confusion sometimes stems, of course, just from the word itself, which seems to imply movement. Obviously, in Spanish, when you’re dealing with (in Spanish) as opposed to (in Spanish) was a lot easier if we actually just call it – as Secretary Clinton says, let’s just call it what it is. It’s slavery, pure and simple. I think that once you switch over to the conception of this as a problem of (in Spanish) or (in Spanish) it changes the way that we inquire into it. And so while our government – not through my office, but through other parts of the government – whether it’s those that deal with international law enforcement or human rights issues, is calling the attention of people to these types of cases, it’s only when the migrants are held for labor, for services, for prostitution that it ends up coming under the definition, both in international law, U.S. law, and Mexican law. And so that’s the reason why those cases are not in them.
We’ve seen those types of cases in the United States as well, this extortion that happens, and we’ve very committed to working with our Mexican counterparts to try to protect the migrants, whether it’s from slavery, which is my job and what’s in the report on the one hand, and from other social ills as well.
QUESTION: Thanks, Ambassador. Can you tell us about Colombia and Venezuela – excuse me. Martha Avila, TV Colombia. Can you tell us about Colombia and Venezuela?
AMBASSADOR CDEBACA: Well, one of the things that we continue to see with Colombia is that because Colombia has a very proactive form of doing law enforcement, learned through many of the other areas of policing and dealing with disorder over the last 20 years, that Colombia ends up being pretty successful in dealing with this fast-changing area of the law.
Let me explain what I mean by that. If people wait for trafficking victims to come to them and formally enter a (in Spanish), which I think that’s – we definitely have that in Mexico, I think that in – maybe not so much in Colombia – in so much of Latin America, we see this requirement that the triggering effect has to be the trafficking victim coming forward. And what we know is that if the trafficker has done his job, the trafficking victim thinks that the price of coming forward is that their family will be killed or that they themselves will be hurt, or even that they think maybe no one will believe them. So there are all of these impediments to the victim coming forward.
What we’ve seen in Colombia is because of using other proactive law enforcement for the fight against the narco-traffickers and others, because of switching over to the adversarial trials with oral advocacy as opposed to the paper trail, it seems to be translating into results. And so this last year, we saw 144 investigations in trafficking in Colombia. This is – stands out in the entire area.
But that’s not why Colombia’s on Tier 1. At the end of the day, I think that one of the reasons why Colombia is on Tier 1 is because the integration of prosecution and prevention – the national call center in Colombia is actually integrated into the police so that when somebody calls in, it’s not just that you take that person and you give them to the church to care for; rather, it’s actually more of a seamless transition. That’s a very cutting-edge technique, and it’s something that we’d like to see in other parts of Latin America and, frankly, in other parts of the world.
You asked also about Venezuela. Venezuela fell this year. We had seen Venezuela in prior years up on the Tier 2, on the watch list, and that was something that we thought was a positive trend. We were disappointed this last year to see that trend reverse itself with less work being done. Now, there’s a new comprehensive law that’s before the Venezuelan congress that we hope that it will pass and we hope that it will reverse this trend. But until it does it – and of course, we can’t give credit for that type of thing.
I think the biggest problem that we see there is that there’s no real mechanism to identify victims. And while there is a hotline it just – it functions sporadically. People might call it and nobody answers. So we’d like to see the efforts in Venezuela rise up to the same level as we have in many other countries in the region.
MODERATOR: Okay. We’re going to go to New York. New York, go ahead, please.
QUESTION: My name is Sezai Kalayci, and I work with Zaman Turkish Daily Newspaper. My question is, I’m wondering about the Iraq and Afghanistan. What’s these two countries’ situation on the human trafficking? Thank you.
AMBASSADOR CDEBACA: One of the things that we saw this last year about Iraq is that the – with the formation of the government, the time is right for action. And so the Government of Iraq has now issued a action plan, which has, at its core, the passage of modern anti-trafficking legislation. At the end of the day, what we think that that will do is it will make it so the protections for trafficking victims exist in the entire country rather than only in the north. This is something that we’ve seen in recent years, is that the only parts of Iraq where cases are actually being investigated and prosecuted are in the northern part of the country. So what we’re hoping that with this passage of the law, which we expect and which we will work with the Iraqi parliament on in the coming months, that we’ll be able to see those cases being done no matter what part of the country the victims find themselves.
Yes?
QUESTION: Rodney Jaleci from ABS-CBN, Philippines. The Philippines was taken off the Tier 2 watch list. May we know what were the biggest factors that contributed to the improvement of the Philippine standing, and what more does it – does the government need to do to maybe move up to another tier, higher tier? Thank you.
AMBASSADOR CDEBACA: Well, I like that kind of a question, because I think it’s the – that’s the spirit that has seen countries move up. I mean, think about it. In the year 2000, 2001, Bosnia was almost open for business as far as the traffickers were concerned. The Albanian Mafia, people coming in at the end of the war – they were on Tier 3 for a long time. Now they’re on Tier 1. Fuji has gone from Tier 3 two years ago all the way to Tier 2 this year because of what they are doing. So a country that makes that decision doesn’t just say we’re willing to move up a little bit; it wants to aim for the highest tier. We think that that’s exactly what everyone should do, with the understanding that Tier 1 is not a reprieve. It doesn’t mean you have a problem; it means you have a responsibility to act.
Specifically though, as far as what the Philippines has done, I think that there are a number of factors if you look at the application of the minimum standards, whether that’s the breaking of the backlog by the edict that came out from the supreme court that actually has had the result of fast-tracking trafficking in persons cases – there’s a big backlog on all sorts of cases in the Philippines, but breaking the backlog and moving up this critical human rights violation so that it gets done more quickly – that’s made a big difference.
I think that the work to assist victims abroad and help get them home that we see in the consulates from around the world, the commitment of the ambassadors around the world, and a willingness to look at corruption issues, whether it’s with the arrests of certain folks on border guards and at the airport and other things, a very good structure with the ICATS (ph), the inner-ministerial body that’s chaired by the vice president and the attorney general – all of those are factors, but I think that they all really just describe one phenomenon, which is political will.
We’ve seen out of not just President Aquino but from the Philippines – the people of the Philippines a desire to stop this, whether a Filipino’s at home or whether they’re abroad. And I think that there’s just a culture now in the Philippines that says it’s time to fight this problem. I know that one of our anti-trafficking heroes, one of the women who’s leading the fight, is here, and perhaps she’ll be able to – when she has her turn, you’ll be able to ask her a little bit more. But this is an example that I think other countries would be wise to look at. Just as Colombia has best practices to aspire to, the journey that the Philippines is taking is a very impressive one right now.
MODERATOR: All right. We have time for just a few more questions.
AMBASSADOR CDEBACA: Yes, please.
QUESTION: Thank you, Mr. Ambassador. I’d like to begin by asking your apology, because in the previous story I corrected what I thought was a typo, the spelling of your name. Anyway, my question is a follow-up to that.
MODERATOR: Before you begin, can you please state your name and news organization?
QUESTION: Oh. My name is Jenny Ilustre, Malaya, Philippine English Daily. My question has to do with now that the Philippines is off the Tier 2 watch list, please explain to us its impact on the MCC grant, which is now under implementation.
AMBASSADOR CDEBACA: Well, I’m going to take that as a two-part question. The first thing that I’m going to say is for all of those of you who are writing either in Spanish or Tagalog, feel free to use my real name, which is (in Spanish.) (Laughter.) Happy to have that used. The reason it looks like a misspelling is because the C.deBaca that my family has used for the last 100 years or so here in America didn’t work with the State Department email system – (laughter) – because the punto, the period, is now evidently something for the computers, so that’s why the weird spelling of my last name. But please, call me any of the variations that you’d like to.
As far as the MCC is concerned, I mean, I really would want to leave that to the MCC, as far exactly how it weighs that. But certainly it’s the falling to Tier 3, which is something that the MCC takes into account, and takes into account very negatively. I think that the MCC correctly feels that Tier 3 countries are ones in which rule of law is not available to the most vulnerable, which, of course, is one of the pillars of the compacts themselves, is to be making sure that the most vulnerable parts of society have access to justice, have access to court, have access to being made whole for what was done to them. Now, these are steps. They’re steps in the right direction, but they certainly don’t mean that everyone’s out of the woods yet.
I think that Ambassador Thomas said at the prosecutor training last week that now is not the time to get out the champagne, because the difference between 15 and 25 cases is a beginning rather than a culmination. And I think he’s correct, but I think that a little bit of champagne is also in order, because I think that this represents a lot of hard work by a lot of people. The secret now with the Philippines is going to be sustaining and even intensifying this approach.
Yes, please.
QUESTION: Hi. I’m Jim from The Straits Times Newspaper of Singapore. This report is in its eleventh year, and I was wondering, going ahead, what sort of changes do you see needing to make in order to become more effective. As the Secretary mentioned, more prosecutions have become static in sort of recent years, and she said that a measure of success can no longer be whether a country has passed laws. So I was wondering in that regard how – what sort of reforms going ahead do you see?
And if I may, just one quick question on Singapore as well. It was taken off the watch list. Going ahead, what are your expectations of what they should do next, the main thing they need to do next?
AMBASSADOR CDEBACA: Exactly. Well, those two are actually, I think, very well related, those questions. For countries that don’t yet have modern anti-trafficking laws, of course, everything she said about if you have a law that’s not enough, we still have countries that don’t have laws, and we need to work with those countries, and we stand ready to work with them as colleagues.
I certainly know from being a prosecutor in the years when we were trying to use our old laws versus when we were using our modern laws how much of a difference that made, not just for me in court but also for the victims, because the good law is not simply a prosecution law. The good law has contained in it the victim’s protections, the notion that it take a while for a victim to be able to process what happened them, to start becoming a survivor, and at that point be able to help with the investigation, but even better, to get on with their life. So a good law is not simply a prosecution law.
Having said that, one of the things that we see, I think especially in former – in commonwealth countries, is that there are some countries, both in ASEAN and the SAARC regions, that are maintaining an approach to trafficking in persons that was the cutting-edge approach that the British Empire took around the world in the 1880s, and that was laws which mainly focus upon the movement of women for prostitution across international borders. If that is what trafficking is defined in or defined as by a country, they are out of step with the United Nations definitions, which focus much more on the exploitation of the worker.
So that notion of this as a slavery problem rather than as a movement of prostitutes problem or a movement of people problem – this is one of the things that we were very intrigued by with the Government of Singapore in the recent months, when they announced that even though they have not yet acceded to the Palermo Protocol, the United Nations protocol, and they were going to be studying whether they should sign on, that they have now issued a directive to their police to start using the Palermo definition nonetheless when looking at whether or not somebody’s a victim. And I think that even just that change in focus between is this a migrant prostitute versus is this a potential trafficking victim is going to have a real impact.
The other thing that the Government of Singapore did that caught my attention, so much so that I’m carrying it around with me, is issued to police officers a little card that actually has the indicators of trafficking in persons. Rather than waiting for that victim to come to you and say “I’m a trafficking victim,” instead it’s questions that the police officers are supposed to ask of themselves, like, “Is the victim in possession of identification and travel documents? If not, who has them? Have they been threatened with deportation or law enforcement? Can they freely contact their friends or families? Is their salary being garnished to pay off a smuggling fee? Do they have freedom of movement?”
These types of things, I think, change the dynamic, because then it’s not up to the individual cop in Singapore to know all of these fancy definitions. All they have to know is to remember – I mean, if I can carry this – and I lose things all the time – (laughter) – if I can carry this around, and I don’t even work in Singapore, than certainly Singaporean police will be able to do this. It’s that kind of innovation that was lacking over the previous decade in Singapore. The fact that Singapore is exhibiting a political will to show this kind of innovation over the last six months is a very positive thing, I think for the entire ASEAN region.
I’ll be going to Singapore on – I leave next week, on the first trip after the report comes out, and Singapore will be one of the countries that I’m going to, and I’ll be meeting, not just with the Singaporeans but with prosecutors and others from around ASEAN. And I think one of the things that we’re hoping is that we’ll be able to share a lot of these innovations. In fact, one of the innovations is that invited to this ASEAN conference are some other countries, such as Nigeria, where they’ve made up for lack of resources by having an innovative structure that brings police and social workers together.
So that’s something that I think that is a very positive thing coming out of Singapore just in the last six months, is a change towards the international standards. I think that’s going to have results on the ground within the year, because when the Singaporean police decide to do something, they tend to go out and do it.
MODERATOR: Okay. We are going to have to break there. And part two of our briefing will begin momentarily.
# # #
