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Profits from human traffick
01/08/2003 10:17 - (SA)
Vienna - Ailing industries across Europe and North America are profiting from trafficking in people who are smuggled from poor countries to work as modern-day slaves in the west.
The Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) has adopted a programme to combat all forms of human trafficking, terming it a "new form of slavery".
The victims toil in sweatshops in France, restaurants in Belgium, in orchards in England and Spain and on building sites in Germany, giving paid to the notion that trafficking is limited to the sex industry and the third world, said the OSCE's Danielle del Marmol.
"There are many other forms of forced labour, of slavery, in industrialised countries," said Del Marmol, who heads a working group on human trafficking at OSCE headquarters in Vienna.
The International Labour Organisation said in a study that forced labour was "more lucrative and less risky than drug trafficking" and helped to sustain industries that were no longer competitive, like agriculture and the textile business.
The body said the demand for cheap labour, along with efforts to curb legal immigration, created a fertile breeding ground for illegal immigration and blackmarket labour, which often turned into forced labour.
The OSCE has called on its members to make human trafficking a criminal offence and to set up special units to combat it.
The body's 55 members include countries whose poor are duped into forced labour, like Albania, Moldova and Uzbekistan, central European states that serve as transit zones for trafficking and the rich countries that are the end destinations.
Figures supplied by the United Nations' Office on Drugs and Crime, based in Vienna, singled out France, Greece, Belgium and Turkey as the biggest consumers of forced labour but said all industrialised countries were guilty.
An ILO report published last May described how traffickers send Russian workers to Greece from where they slip into England by pretending to be tourists going home via London.
Here they work in the horticulture industry for a pittance without work permits and live in fear that somebody could denounce them to the authorities.
In Spain, Moroccan immigrants have obtained work permits only to be sidelined in favour of "thousands of young Poles and Romanians who are considered more docile", the ILO said.
In Germany, it estimates, the building industry employs 300 000 to 400 000 illegal immigrants in appalling conditions.
"The fact that illegal labourers are exploited in our countries shows that there is a need for cheap unskilled labour," the OSCE's del Marmol, Belgium's ambassador to the body, said.
She said the OSCE hoped that its plan of action against human trafficking will strike a "sensible balance between criminalising human trafficking, protecting the victims and cooperation between governments, international organisation and NGOs".
Many countries have yet to ratify the existing international treaties against trafficking and adopt laws that criminalise the trade in people.
As for the victims, they are often promptly expelled as illegal immigrants instead of being offered protection and helped to find a better life within their own communities.
In spite of the good intentions of the UN, the European Commission and other organisations who seek to combat human trafficking, a lot of time and money goes to waste, del Marmol said.
"There are too many seminars and not enough action and coordination."
- AFP
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