14 March 2005
Washington Meeting Will Focus on Human Trafficking in Caribbean, March 14, 2005 (Event being hosted by Organization of American States)
By Eric Green
Washington File Staff Writer
Washington -- Some 75 officials and experts have gathered in Washington to form strategies to combat trafficking in persons in the Caribbean.
The March 14-16 meeting is focusing on human trafficking in the Bahamas, Barbados, Guyana, Jamaica, the Netherlands Antilles, Saint Lucia, and Suriname, says the Organization of American States (OAS), which is hosting the event at its Washington headquarters.
The OAS said in a March 14 statement that the meeting marks the first time that representatives from across the Caribbean have gathered to specifically address the question of trafficking in persons, as well as to develop regional cooperative action to prevent and combat the crime -- which the U.S. State Department has likened to a modern-day slave trade.
The International Organization for Migration and the OAS Inter-American Commission of Women are jointly convening the meeting. Within the Caribbean, those two groups are currently operating a counter-trafficking project that receives funding from the State Department.
That project calls on authorities to take the necessary steps to prevent trafficking in persons. In their summary of the project, the two groups describe the Caribbean as a "region of dynamic migration flows" that requires a counter-trafficking strategy focused particularly on women and children.
The project aims to give governments and civil society the "necessary tools" to develop a comprehensive response to combat trafficking in persons. The project educates the public about the dangers of trafficking -- not only to victims, but to society as a whole.
The meeting in Washington precedes a March 18 conference in Vienna, Austria, on combating trafficking in children in the 55 participating states of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
The State Department said in its June 2004 "Trafficking in Persons Report" that each year an estimated 600,000 to 800,000 people are trafficked across international borders, with that number growing. This figure is in addition to a far larger, yet indeterminate number of people trafficked within countries.
Victims are forced into prostitution, or forced to work in quarries and sweatshops, on farms, as domestics, as child soldiers, and in many forms of involuntary servitude.
The State Department calls trafficking in persons a multi-dimensional threat to all nations.
Human trafficking, said the State Department, is connected to organized crime and grave security threats, such as drug and weapons trafficking, and is linked to serious public health concerns, as victims contract illnesses and diseases. A country that elects "to downplay its human trafficking problem in favor of other pressing concerns does so at its peril," the State Department added.
