Biometric system soon to combat illegal migration

Rafik JALALDEEN

The Government had decided to introduce the biometric system to combat illegal migration and the amendments would be made to the Foreign Employment Act to facilitate this move.

“Human trafficking is not a large scale problem in Sri Lanka compared to other South Asian countries. Sri Lanka does not face a big problem in terms of human trafficking,” the Media Secretary to the Ministry of Child Development and Woman’s Empowerment Indrani Sugathadasa said.

“There are some internal human trafficking cases that were filed such as, young girls being brought from rural areas and abused in various ways. Children had been used as domestic aides and even placed at holiday resorts for sex.

“However, many of the internal human trafficking cases were unreported to authorities,” she added. Sugathadasa pointed out combating external human trafficking is a matter of upmost priority.

“Some foreign employment agencies send women as housemaids and when they arrive in those countries they find things different to what they were promised by the agencies,” she said.

The Ministry of Child Development and Women’s Empowerment in collaboration with the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) launched a consultation yesterday to bring together stakeholders to share information and collaborate more closely on interventions of human trafficking, smuggling, transnational crime and exploitation.

Elaborating on human smuggling and human trafficking, Assistant Controller Immigration and Emigration Department Parakrama Fernando said in the case of human smuggling the person knows his destination, how his documents were forged and all other details. In contrast, in human trafficking the victim has no knowledge that he/she was being trafficked.

“The present Foreign Employment Act was amended over a decade ago. A committee was appointed to reform the existing foreign employment law and bring it to the Parliament,” Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment Deputy General Manager(FR) L.K. Ruhunage said.

It is also a vital step forward to register all the details of all citizens in a digitalised environment. “We can also combat human trafficking and track the culprits if we have all updated information and digitalised pertaining to every citizen,” he added.

Foreign Employment Working Director D.B.Sumithraarachchi said they were planning to bring the biomatrix system at the Airport and all Sri Lankan citizens passing the Air port should leave submit themselves for finger printing.