01 October 2010

U.S. Lawmakers, Officials Focus on Human Trafficking

House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Howard Berman

By MacKenzie C. Babb
Staff Writer

Washington — Participants in a U.S. House of Representatives committee hearing say progress is being made in the fight against human trafficking, a global problem known as modern-day slavery that affects an estimated 12 million people worldwide.

However, committee members and government officials also emphasize there is much more work to be done.

“Human trafficking is an affront to human dignity that links communities across the world in a web of money, exploitation and victimization,” House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Howard Berman said September 30 at a hearing by his panel on combating the global problem.

In October, U.S. lawmakers will celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, which seeks to end human trafficking. The law increased protection for victims and established stronger punishments for convicted traffickers. It also helped lead the way for 115 other nations to write laws banning human trafficking.

Together, these laws have resulted in a global increase in the number of victims rescued and perpetrators brought to justice, according to Ambassador Luis CdeBaca, who heads the State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons.

Berman said that in September U.S. authorities dismantled the nation’s largest human trafficking ring and indicted six recruiters for their actions in bringing 400 Thai laborers to the United States. The workers were lured with promises of high-paying jobs. Berman said their passports were confiscated on their arrival to the United States and they were forced to work under “slave-like conditions” — without electricity, sanitation or running water.

Traffickers threatened them with deportation and took their wages, telling laborers they could not be free until they paid off their recruitment fee, Berman said. Known as bondage labor, this is one of the most common, and least well-known, types of trafficking worldwide, U.S. officials said.

CdeBaca told the committee that the fight against human trafficking is difficult because the problem is widespread and appears in many different forms.

“People are held in involuntary servitude in factories, farms and homes; bought and sold in prostitution; and captured to serve as child soldiers. It is a crime that is not limited to one gender, faith or geographic area but impacts individuals and societies across the globe,” CdeBaca said.

Human trafficking is a $32 billion criminal enterprise, second only to the illegal drug trade in the profits it generates for perpetrators, Berman said. It affects millions of men, women and children each year.

Berman, CdeBaca and others highlighted the importance of continued international cooperation to combat the problem, praising a new global consensus on the criminalization of human trafficking and all of its components.

(This is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://www.america.gov)