GENEVA – The U.N. Committee on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families criticized on Monday the inability of Mexico to catch and prosecute those engaged in human trafficking.“Migrants traveling across Mexico are prone to extortion and kidnapping by criminal organizations associated with drug trafficking,” committee member Francisco Carrion Mena said.
“It’s obvious that in Mexico the so-called ‘migration business’ exists and it is very worrying that the government has made no significant progress in prosecuting those responsible for human trafficking,” he said.
“There is a flourishing ‘migration business’ and despite government efforts, we see the problem growing like a cancer. And officials at the local level take advantage of the situation,” agreed Ana Elisabeth Cubias Mena, another committee member.
Carrion acknowledged that criminal gangs find ways around whatever action the government attempts, but recalled that this does not excuse the state from its responsibility of doing everything necessary to fix the problem.
Carrion recalled the “ghastly milestone” last August when 70 South and Central American migrants were massacred in the northern Mexican state of Tamaulipas, and asked the authorities for more effective intervention.
“We notice a recurring lack of coordination among the different levels of the administration,” he said.
Salvador Beltran del Rio, commissioner of Mexico’s INM immigration agency and head of the Mexican delegation to the meeting in Geneva, said “the action of organized crime has become the chief threat to migrants traveling across Mexico.”Beltran said that faced with this situation, migrants’ access to justice has become “essential,” adding that “a number of mechanisms have been set up to make reporting crime easier, such as ‘humanitarian visas’ issued to migrants who are either victims or witnesses of criminal acts.”
Mexico has 1 million foreign-born residents and some 150,000 migrants traveling through the country each year, the commissioner said.
The committee is an organization charged with making sure that signatory nations of the July 2003 Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families comply with that treaty ratified by 44 countries. EFE
Source: laht.com
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