Organ Trafficking - Exploitation of children

SATURDAY 19 OCTOBER 2013

According to the report, 371 children were exploited, including 95 from Vietnam, 67 from Nigeria and 25 from China.

The girl's organs were intended to be sold to people seeking a transplant, and child protection charities warned the case was unlikely to be an isolated incident.

A girl was smuggled from Somalia to the UK to have her organs harvested, it has been revealed.The case, involving an unnamed girl, was detailed in a Government report into human trafficking, which claimed that the number of people trafficked in Britain rose by more than half last year. 

Bharti Patel, the chief executive of Ecpat UK, a charity which campaigns against child sexual exploitation and trafficking, told The Daily Telegraph: "Traffickers are exploiting the demand for organs and the vulnerability of children. It's unlikely that a trafficker is going to take this risk and bring just one child into the UK. It is likely there was a group."

Image Courtesy: http://davidshoebridge.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/organ-harvesting.jpg

The details were published on Anti-Slavery Day, as the government announced tough new sentencing plans for traffickers, under which offenders who already have a conviction for a serious sexual or violent offense will get an automatic life sentence.

The measure will be included in the Modern Slavery Bill, which was unveiled by Home Secretary Theresa May at the Conservative Party conference last month.

It will also introduce Trafficking Prevention Orders to restrict the activity and movement of convicted traffickers.

James Brokenshire, crime and security minister, said: "Modern slavery is an appalling evil in our midst."

"All this is a good start, but we need everyone to play a part - government, law enforcement, business, charities - if we are to consign slavery to the history books where it belongs."

And victims' minister Damian Green said: "The trafficking of vulnerable men and women is something that no civilised country should tolerate."

Matthew Reed, chief executive of The Children's Society, welcomed to move, but called for the Government to do more than just toughen up criminal justice measures.He said: "The announcement of harsh penalties for traffickers is an important step forward, coming as it does on Anti-Slavery Day.

"But for the fight against this brutal crime to be effective, the victims of trafficking must get the support they need to be kept safe.

"Too many trafficked children, who are subjected to a range of horrific abuse, such as domestic servitude and sexual exploitation, are not getting the protection they need to keep them safe from further exploitation and abuse, including being re-trafficked."

 

Forced Labor – The International trend of Human Trafficking in Canada.

Human trafficking in Canada has become a significant legal and political issue, and Canadian legislators have been criticized for having failed to deal with the problem in a more systematic way.

In 2005, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) estimated that 600-800 persons are trafficked into Canada annually and that additional 1,500-2,200 persons are trafficked through Canada into the United States.

Forced labor in numbers:

• Three out of every 1,000 people worldwide are in forced labor today where as18.7 million (90 %) are exploited in the private economy, by individuals or enterprises. Of these, 4.5 million (22 per cent) are victims of forced sexual exploitation and 14.2 million (68 per cent) are victims of forced labor exploitation in economic activities, such as agriculture, construction, domestic work or manufacturing.
• 2.2 million (10%) are in state-imposed forms of forced labor, for example in prisons, or in work imposed by the state military or by rebel armed forces.
• 5.5 million (26 %) are below 18 years are observed, the number of victims per thousand inhabitants is highest in the central and south-eastern Europe and Africa regions at 4.2 and 4.0 per 1,000 inhabitants respectively. It is the lowest in the Developed Economies and European Union at 1.5 per 1,000 inhabitants.
  
  

  
  
  
  Nearly 21 million people are victims of forced labor across the world, trapped in jobs which they were coerced or deceived into and which they cannot leave, according to the ILO’s new global estimate.
  
  
  The Asia-Pacific region accounts for the largest number of forced laborers in the world – 11.7 million (56 per cent) of the global total, followed by Africa at 3.7 million (18 per cent) and Latin America with 1.8 million victims (9 per cent).