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[ Country-by-Country Reports ] SRI LANKA (TIER 2 Watch List)
[Extracted from U.S. State Dept Trafficking in Persons Report, June 2009] Sri
Lanka is primarily a source and, to a much lesser extent, a destination for
men and women trafficking for the purposes of forced labor and commercial
sexual exploitation. Sri Lankan men and women migrate willingly to Kuwait,
Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates, Oman,
Bahrain, and Singapore to work as construction workers, domestic servants, or
garment factory workers. Some of these workers find themselves in situations
of involuntary servitude when faced with restrictions on movement, withholding
of passports, threats, physical or sexual abuse, and debt bondage that is, in
some instances, facilitated by large pre-departure fees imposed by labor
recruitment agencies and their unlicensed sub-agents. Children are trafficked
within the country for commercial sexual exploitation and, very infrequently,
for forced labor. The designated Foreign Terrorist Organization, Liberation
Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) continued to recruit, sometimes forcibly,
children for use as soldiers in areas outside of the Sri Lankan
government’s control. Government security forces may be complicit in
letting a breakaway LTTE faction that has aligned itself with the government,
to unlawfully recruit child soldiers, sometimes with force. A small number of
women from Thailand, China, and Russia, and other countries of the former
Soviet Union may be trafficked into Sri Lanka for commercial sexual
exploitation. Sri
Lanka does not fully comply with the minimum standards for the elimination of
trafficking; however, it is making significant efforts to do so. Despite
these overall efforts, the government has not shown evidence of progress in
convicting and punishing trafficking offenders; therefore, Sri Lanka is
placed on Tier 2 Watch List. While the Sri Lankan government did not achieve
any convictions of trafficking offenders, it arrested 29 alleged traffickers
and started prosecutions against ten people for trafficking-related offenses,
an increase from the previous year when no one was arrested or prosecuted for
trafficking-related crimes. It also drafted a national policy on migration
that promises to prevent the trafficking of Sri Lankan migrants and it
developed a national anti-trafficking task force that should become
operational in the coming year. Recommendations for Sri Lanka: Vigorously investigate and prosecute suspected
trafficking offenses and convict and punish trafficking offenders,
particularly those responsible for recruiting victims with fraudulent offers
of employment and excessive commission fees; follow through with the creation
of the national anti-trafficking task force; develop and implement through
training of law enforcement personnel formal victim referral procedures; and
ensure that victims of trafficking found within Sri Lanka are not detained or
otherwise penalized for unlawful acts committed as a direct result of their
being trafficked. Prosecution The
Sri Lankan Bureau of Foreign Employment (SLBFE), which is responsible for
regulating foreign employment agencies and protecting Sri Lankan workers
going abroad, developed a ranking system that would publicly grade all
employment agencies based inter alia on the number of complaints the
SLBFE receives relating to each agency, the number of legal cases against
each, and the time each takes to resolve disputes with workers. This ranking
system will be available on a website, but has not yet been finalized. The
Attorney General began drafting a circular that would advise police to
identify possible trafficking victims among women they detain for
prostitution; this too has not yet been finalized. In collaboration with IOM,
the police added a trafficking training module to the standard police
curriculum used to train all new police recruits, as well as adding the
curricula of two in-service police training institutes; so far, 520 police
officers have received training on the new trafficking module. Following
the November 2007 repatriation of 118 Sri Lankan peacekeepers from Haiti
because of accusations that some of them had engaged in sexual misconduct,
including possible exploitation of children, a Sri Lankan military court
found 23 officers and soldiers guilty of sexual misconduct and abuse of
children. During the last year, two of the officers were forced out of the
military and one solider was discharged, while two other soldiers
subsequently died in military action within Sri Lanka. Punishment for the
remaining eight officers and ten soldiers has not yet been reported. Protection Although
government personnel did not employ formal procedures for proactively
identifying victims and referring them to service providers, some ad hoc
referrals were made during the year. Police did not attempt to identify
trafficking victims among 16 foreign women who were arrested on prostitution
charges during the year; all were placed in detention until they could pay
for their departure from Sri Lanka. The government provided no legal
alternatives for the removal of foreign victims to countries where they may
face hardship or retribution. Authorities encouraged victims to participate
in investigations and prosecutions of trafficking offenders, though sex
trafficking victims rarely came forward to cooperate with police and
prosecutors out of fear that doing so would damage their reputations. The
slow pace of the Sri Lankan judicial system provided a strong disincentive to
come forward. The government generally did not penalize victims of
trafficking for unlawful acts committed as a direct result of their being
trafficked, though some sex trafficking victims could have been penalized
because the government failed to identify them among persons arrested for
prostitution offenses. Victims who were employed abroad may seek assistance
from the SLBFE. The SLBFE collected fees from registered workers who went
abroad, which were used to run shelters abroad, as well as domestically at
the international airport. Prevention |