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US ready to assist curb human trafficking

by Nadira Gunatilleke

The US Government is willing to provide assistance to train Sri Lankan police officers and other officials to prevent human trafficking but so far only National Child Protection Authority (NCPA) has obtained this facility.

Under the assistance programme arranged by the US Government we can invite US experts to visit Sri Lanka and train our officers or send them to the US for training, Executive Director, Lawyers for Human Rights and Development (LHRD), Kalyananda Tiranagama said. He was speaking at the seminar organised by the LHRD on the theme of 'Human Trafficking' held at the Taj Samudra Hotel, Colombo yesterday.

He said that in Sri Lanka about 3,000 persons disappear annually and only about 1,500 of them are being traced. Women and children are specially subjected to trafficking.

But in our Penal Code there is no article directly related to the human trafficking and the existing articles related to human trafficking are not implemented properly due to various shortcomings and loopholes in the law, he said.

Tiranagama said that the US Government is willing to assist Sri Lanka and other countries which have a high rate of human trafficking. Time to time human trafficking incidents reported from Sri Lanka and incidents related to trafficking children for use as camel jockeys, and workers in dry fish processing centres have been reported. It is also reported that the children are being used to obtain human organs for sick persons.

In Sri Lanka officials often discovered children under the age of 18 who have been employed as domestic servants or prostitutes but when the police charge the accused for the offence they do not include trafficking but only charge for employing.

"During a recent tour in USA, we discovered one Sri Lankan girl who was employed in California as a slave. About 50,000 persons from Asian countries are brought into the USA annually for slavery. USA is willing to support those countries to prevent this human trafficking," Tiranagama said.

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