Image via Wikipedia
By Sheila Kamerman and Dick Wittenberg
The biggest case ever brought against a people-smuggling ring in the Netherlands went sour Thursday, when a court in Zwolle failed to convict a gang of Nigerian smugglers of the more serious charge of human trafficking.
The two main suspects and four accomplices were convicted of the lesser charge of people smuggling, receiving prison sentences ranging from six months to four years. Five other defendants were acquitted.
The people smugglers were arrested in October 2007. According to police, the gang smuggled at least 139 women into the Netherlands from Nigeria in 2006 and 2007. The women would apply for asylum giving a bogus story to authorities and claim to be underage. The Dutch government would then house the women in shelters for underage refugees, from which they would disappear soon thereafter.
Nigerian women have been vanishing from shelters in this manner since at least 1996, and the total number of missing women runs in the hundreds. Some women later popped up again working as prostitutes in the Netherlands, leading authorities to suspect they were being forced into prostitution.
Warner ten Kate, responsible for the prosecution of human trafficking at the national public prosecutor's office, expressed disappointment over the verdict and announced he would be appealing the case in a higher court.
Share/Save/Bookmark
A new interrogation method used by police was the main reason the case went sour.
Dutch police developed its new method to persuade scared victims into giving statements. Almost all victims of human trafficking, young Nigerian women in this case, are too fearful of their tormentors to talk to police. In this specific case, the smugglers hoped to cajole their victims into silence by making them swear absolute loyalty to them in a traditional ritual. The victims believed breaking the oath would have dire consequences for them.
To sooth their fears of magical retribution, police and prosecution brought in an African cleric, who tried to convince the women that the God of the Christian Bible would prove stronger than the heathen magic used by the smugglers. Police also introduced suspected victims to a women who had herself been a victim of human trafficking, allowing her to tell them her personal story. With this outside help, police were successful in extracting statements from some of the victims.
While the court did not condemn these creative practices per se, it was very critical of the manner in which they were carried out. The Nigerian women working with the police were given ample opportunity to give long speeches to the victims, which might have influenced their statements. The cleric wrote up reports of conversations he carried out at his own initiative and sent them to the police. While the police claimed these reports where never used in the course of the investigation, the court found this impossible to verify.
The judges also slammed the prosecution for failing to ensure that the protocol for interrogations was followed and evaluated regularly, thus preventing undue influencing of witnesses’ statements.
The interrogations carried out by police were also criticised in the verdict. The court found a five-page report of an eight-hour interview particularly wanting because there was no audiovisual registration.
The defence came down hard on the prosecution’s' methods. Lawyer Sjoerd Berge van Henegouwe called the accounts of government witnesses "prefabricated statements from the prosecution's victim factory."
Lawyer Ronald Roethof in turn called the witnesses "alleged victims who have been coaxed into a statement by dangling a residence permit in front of them". Berge van Henegouwen said the verdict was "comeuppance well-deserved" for the prosecution.
Prosecutor Ten Kate called the verdict inconsistent. "The court said people smuggling has been proven, but human trafficking has not. What then does it suppose these women were brought to Europe for?"
http://www.nrc.nl/international/article2429958.ece/Court_clears_Nigerian_people_smugglers_of_human_trafficking
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=324eff29-1101-4b8f-9f84-9da72866da8f)
No comments:
Post a Comment