Rohingya migrants raped at Thai-Malaysia border camps: report - The Express Tribune

Rohingya migrants raped at Thai-Malaysia border camps: report - The Express Tribune:

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UN rights boss urges Thailand to drop defamation charges | Reuters

Source:  Reuters

The top U.N. human rights official urged Thailand on Thursday to drop criminal charges against two journalists accused of defamation for citing a Reuters investigation into the role of Thai naval security forces in smuggling Rohingya asylum seekers.

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http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/12/26/thailand-rohingya-un-rights-idUSL6N0K51A120131226?goback=%2Egde_4165508_member_5822800466752327684#%21

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Addressing Laws That Allowed 400 Farm Workers to Become Trafficking Victims | Immigrant Rights | Change.org

Source: Change.org

by Alex DiBranco September 15, 2010 02:36 PM (PT)

In the largest labor trafficking case to ever come under indictment in the United States, 400 Thai farm workers were freed from their bondage recently in a major bust. Shutting down a second trafficking ring resulted in the not insignificant release of 44 human trafficking victims. How many more of the agricultural workers who put food on our table live in modern-day slavery? There's no telling, but these massive operations don't bode well for the security of farm workers in America. The Thai trafficking wing, for instance, had been in operation since 2004 and was only just shut down.

Given these less-than-reassuring signs, agriculture is looking at a major crackdown on illegal labor practices, Amanda Kloer reports on the End Human Trafficking blog. This seems like a good thing, right? Slavery equals bad, stopping slavery equals good. But since farms rely so heavily on foreign labor to keep everything running smoothly, new federal regulations restricting H-2A visas could be a serious hindrance to business as usual, even for those who weren't breaking any labor laws.

Immoral employers in all industries have always been drawn to hire foreign labor in order to assert exorbitant control over their employees, whether they're outright trafficking and enslaving workers or engaging in a slightly subtler form of labor exploitation. Since an immigrant on a work visa has to immediately leave the country if they lose their job, these employers quash dissent over unfair labor practices by waving the deportation card around. A worker facing the threat of not just losing their job, but losing their very right to remain living in the country, has a huge incentive to sit down and shut up no matter what conditions they suffer. And, of course, if they're exploiting undocumented workers, they can threaten one call to immigration authorities to set off instant removal proceedings.

While the Obama administration's new regulation to the H-2A visa, like mandating decent wages and housing, are useful to those workers whose employers follow the letter of the law, it does nothing for those who are already victims of labor trafficking and exploitation. The restrictions make it harder for farms that want to obey the law to bring sufficient labor to their farms (and, no, unemployed Americans cannot simply fill those slots: they've asked), while failing to protect migrant laborers within our borders, even if they followed legal pathways to their jobs.

Addressing the "deportation card" and the vulnerability of temporary workers by doing away with automatic removal proceedings, giving them time to find a new job or levy charges of unjust labor practices, would provide much better sanctuary for potential trafficking victims than more regulations that will just be ignored, or require major expenses to monitor. And protecting immigrants serves the dual purpose of making certain that Americans aren't also faced with shoddy conditions and pay, because if their foreign coworkers cannot speak up they too lose much of their ability to demand labor rights and to bargain.

Photo credit: tlindenbaum

Alex DiBranco is a Change.org Editor who has worked for the Nation, Political Research Associates, and the Center for American Progress. She is now based in New York City.

Addressing Laws That Allowed 400 Farm Workers to Become Trafficking Victims | Immigrant Rights | Change.org

When Children Cry.wmv | UNHCR: The UN Refugee Agency | Causes

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Egypt is transit for human trafficking - Bikya Masr

Jun 14th, 2010 | By Mohamed Abdel Salam 
CAIRO: Egypt’s Assistant Foreign Minister for Human Rights Wael Abu al-Majd said that Egypt has become a significant transit country for migrants, particularly with regard to trafficking in human beings, where Egypt receives annually “large numbers of girls from Eastern Europe and also from Africa who come to Egypt in order to infiltrate into Israel.”

Abul-Magd stressed last week at an international conference organized by the National Council for Human Rights on “Egypt .. and the migration,” that the government alone is not capable of dealing with the transit phenomenon and “there must be concerted efforts both with the participation of businessmen or civil society organizations as well as the role of the media to eliminate this problem through the distribution of roles and responsibilities.”

The assistant foreign minister said that the law on trafficking in human beings, adopted by Parliament last month, “cannot cope alone with the problem of trafficking in human beings, but there must be some authorities and apparatus within the state to learn the dimensions of this crime and to be trained on how to deal with it, as well as to develop a national integrated plan on how to deal with this phenomenon regardless of criminalization and punishment.”

He argued that the new law on trafficking in human beings, which is involved in the preparation of humanitarian law that elevates the interests of victims and set up a fund to care for victims of refugees.


Abu al-Majd noted the shooting of African “infiltrators” to Israel through the Egyptian border.


“They violate laws on a daily basis and there are mafias and gangs of armed men who take the initiative and always shoot Egyptian soldiers at night and try to flee to Israel,” he said.


He added that 14 Egyptian troops were killed and 60 “infiltrators” were killed by those armed groups.

Hafez Abu Saada, the Chairman of the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights (EOHR), asked the participants of the conference to bring the recommendation to Egypt “to demand the government to remove its reservations to the Refugee Convention and the integration of the international legislation, which has been ratified by Egypt in this regard in the legislative structure in Egypt.”

He noted that the Egyptian government arrests arbitrarily African migrants in different areas and “is a particularly egregious violation of human rights and requires the existence of a law on how to deal with refugees and educate police officers who do not know anything about the conventions on the treatment of migrants and asylum seekers.”

BM


Egypt is transit for human trafficking - Bikya Masr