US condemns China, Russia and Uzbekistan for human trafficking
Wednesday, 19 June 2013 23:50

State department's annual slavery report relegates three countries to bottom tier for failing to tackle forced labour and widespread exploitation

The US has condemned China, Russia and Uzbekistan for their failure to stem widespread systematic human trafficking and slavery within their borders.

The annual Trafficking in Persons (Tip) report, released by the US state department on Wednesday, grades the scale and severity of people-trafficking in 188 countries and territories.

It has downgraded China, Russia and Uzbekistan to tier three, the report's lowest ranking, reserved for countries whose governments do not fully comply with the Trafficking Victims Protection Act and are not making significant efforts to do so.

The relegation was attributed to continued failure to stop the routine complicity of officials in trafficking crimes, state-sponsored slavery and widespread forced labour, sexual exploitation, and enslavement of nationals and foreign nationals in the three countries.

The report, which has been published since 2001 and is the US' principal diplomatic tool to engage foreign governments on human trafficking, paints a damning picture of conditions of modern slavery in the three countries. China is criticised for perpetuating human trafficking in 320 state-run institutions and the widespread domestic trafficking of girls and women into forced prostitution. In Russia, an estimated 1 million people are exposed to exploitative labour, including forced labour used in the construction of the Winter Olympic park in Sochi, according to the report.

The government of Uzbekistan continues to force older children and adults into slave labour in its cotton industry, the US state department says, and the country "remains one of only a handful of governments around the world that subjects its citizens to forced labour through the implementation of state policy".

"What we have seen in all three of these countries has been stagnation in efforts and the continuation of issues such as conflated human trafficking and child abduction in China and the continued use of forced labour in Uzbekistan," said Luis CdeBaca, the US state department's ambassador-at-large to monitor and combat trafficking in persons. "With this report, the rankings follow the results and at some point the waivers run out."

The report reveals pitifully low global figures for the prosecution and conviction of trafficking criminals and identification of people who have been trafficked.

Although the International Labour Organisation estimates there are around about 21 million people trapped in forms of forced labour around the world, only about 47,000 people were identified by governments as having been trafficked last year.

Global prosecutions of traffickers rose by about 10% from 2012-13, but totalled only 7,705 cases, with 4,746 resulting in a conviction.

Relegation into tier three ranks China, Russia and Uzbekistan among the countries with the worst records on human trafficking, including Zimbabwe, Saudi Arabia and Yemen. Under US law, it could trigger non-trade related sanctions, leading to restrictions on US foreign assistance and access to global financial institutions such as the World Bank.

This year's report is the first to be released under the new US secretary of state, John Kerry. The decision to downgrade China, Russia and Uzbekistan was hailed as "brave" by anti-trafficking campaigners in the US, who had feared that diplomatic pressure, especially from China and Russia, and a reluctance to be seen as a self-appointed watchdog would influence the rankings.

"The vibe we were picking up earlier this year is that there was a good chance all three countries would be upgraded, which would be a disaster in terms of its impact on internal efforts to take action on the huge trafficking and human rights problems, which affect millions of people," said Holly Burkhalter, vice-president of government relations and advocacy at International Justice Mission.

"Any decision to downgrade represents a significant degree of political courage on behalf of secretary Kerry as neither Russia or China take kindly to criticism from the west," she said.

However, although the report is widely acknowledged as the most influential catalogue of anti-trafficking initiatives by governments, the impartiality of the ranking system has faced criticism.

"Although in general the Tip report paints a reliable – probably the best available – picture of modern-day slavery in all its forms, the rankings can be the problematic issue," said Aidan McQuade, director of Anti-Slavery International.

"This is because the ranking is inevitably coloured by US foreign and strategic interests, and this can give a get-out-of-jail-free card to some countries which are failing to protect their citizens from slavery, meaning that they do not get the bad ranking that they truly deserve."

Other countries including Iraq, Azerbaijan and Congo-Brazzaville escaped relegation, due to what CdeBaca called "concerted efforts on the behalf of their governments to address the problem of human trafficking".

Afghanistan, Barbados, Chad, Malaysia, Maldives and Thailand are facing an automatic downgrade to tier three in the next report if significant progress is not made before the end of the year.

Afghanistan was granted a waiver from an automatic downgrade to tier three despite widespread internal trafficking, government complicity in trafficking rings, and reports of police officers raping and imprisoning trafficking victims.

Annie Kelly

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 http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/2013/jun/19/us-china-russia-uzbekistan-human-trafficking