New Law to Punish Human Traffickers in Bahrain
Bahrain Tribune - 19 February, 2007
Human traffickers in Bahrain will be punished with the
anticipated passage of a law making trafficking a criminal act.
Minister
of Social Development Fatima Al Balooshi said the Government had set up a
national action plan against trafficking, and the legislative document has
already been prepared by an inter-ministerial task force.
“It is just a
matter of time but the final version of the bill has been completed and will be
passed to Parliament soon,” the minister said.
She was one of the key officials who joined yesterday’s
roundtable discussions on combating trafficking in people.
The programme
was held with US State Department advisors on trafficking issues led by Laura
Lederer.
US Ambassador to Bahrain William Monroe said the forum was to
help governments focus closely on global trafficking which accounts for the
exploitation of roughly some 800,000 people – mostly women and children – across
borders around the world.
“This scourge is modern-day slavery involving
victims forced, defrauded or coerced into labour or sexual exploitation,” the
ambassador said.
He said the US Congress had allocated more than $ 82
million in funding for efforts to end trafficking outside the United
States.
Monroe lauded the Bahraini Government’s initial step to address
trafficking, including its opening last year of a shelter for victims of
trafficking and the creation of a high-level task force to deal with the issue.
However, he said the Kingdom still needs to address other issues
including “developing a system for tracking, compiling and disseminating
trafficking-related statistics.”
Bahrain can also continue to develop
victim-protection programmes in addition to the opening of the shelter. The
envoy also called for the need to educate expatriate workers about their rights
and obligations and the public about the consequences of abusing foreign
workers.
Bahrain is considered one of the “destination countries” in the
global trafficking arena considering the Kingdom’s intake of thousands of
workers, including domestic workers, every year. Until last year, the Kingdom
was in the “tier two” watchlist of the US State Department’s report on human
trafficking.
That means Bahrain will have to improve legislation and
enforcement against global trafficking. The forum was attended by senior
officials including Ministry of Foreign Affairs Assistant Undersecretary Shaikh
Abdulaziz bin Mubarak Al Khalifa who chaired the inter-ministerial task force.
He said trafficking issues for Bahrain are not just about entries across
the border because Bahrain already applies strict laws over entry by foreign
nationals. “The issue is not so much on entries of foreign nationals but the
issue is what happens to them once they are inside the country.
“We have
moved from a situation where people objected to the very terminology of human
trafficking and its apparent association with the buying and selling of human
beings as a form of property, to an understanding that the reality of
trafficking is the denial of rights and the exploitation of vulnerability,”
Shaikh Abdul Aziz said.
Bahrain hosts some 200,000 foreign workers.
Workers particularly in the construction sector and an estimated 45,000 foreign
housemaids had posed thorny issues to the Government over the past
years.
Officials would not comment on the highlights of the draft bill
except to say that the bill is “comprehensive” and will make trafficking a
“criminal act.” The draft law stipulates punishment including jail terms to
human
traffickers.