Trafficked women are victims not criminals, conference told

Deportations and other immigration measures are not the solutions to human trafficking, the human rights conference in Dublin heard at the weekend.

Over half of all trafficked women who are deported from Western Europe are reintroduced to the "criminal cycle" which led to their initial trafficking, said Dr Helga Konrad, the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe's special representative on combating trafficking. While Ireland and other destinations place the emphasis on preventing clandestine immigration, "immigration-led responses to the problem of human trafficking are almost always inadequate," she said.

According to Dr Konrad, trafficked women are regarded as wrongdoers or criminals and not as victims. Consequently, they receive little sympathy.

About 500,000 people are trafficked each year, she estimated. In the EU of 15 states, up to 4,000 "mafia" groups were involved.

Ms Suzanne Egan, a law lecturer from UCD, said human trafficking was a lucrative €30 billion business, second only to drugs and arms trafficking.

Ms Egan distinguished between smuggling, which involves the consent of the person transported, and trafficking, which does not. In practice, the two phenomena were often interlinked, and people who were smuggled willingly into a country can later find themselves in desperate situations.

The Minister of State for development co-operation, Mr Conor Lenihan, said trafficking is a by-product of globalisation. He said unless measures were taken now to prevent the growth of trafficking in Ireland and its links to organised crime, society would "lose out" for many years.

The Minister said human rights would be integrated "more and more" into Ireland's overseas development programme. More emphasis would also be placed on good practice in journalism as a way of effecting improvements in civil society in developing countries.

Speaking on the issue of domestic violence against women, the secretary general of Amnesty International, Ms Irene Khan, said it was "the greatest hidden human rights scandal of our times". She said "the gap between rhetoric and reality, between life and law, remains enormous," today.

The facts showed this: one in every three women suffers violence or sexual assault during their lives; in Russia, 14,000 women are killed by their partners each year; in the UK, a woman calls the emergency services for help every two minutes; 750,000 American women report a rape each year. Yet society remained apathetic to the issue of violence against women, she said.

A campaign to protect women who fight for the human rights of others will be launched in Dublin this evening by Front Line, the human rights organisation, writes Alison Healy. The launch is part of an international campaign to protect female human rights activists working in dangerous situations.

Ms Mary Lawlor, the director of Front Line, said the campaign was needed because human rights defenders often faced harassment, detention, torture, defamation, and even death.