MANILA, 2 December 2008 (IRIN): A recent court ruling has given fresh impetus to the battle against human trafficking.
An owner and a cashier at a bar in Daraga, Albay – south of Manila – were convicted for trafficking minors for sexual exploitation on 27 November. They were sentenced to 20 years’ imprisonment and fined around 20.000 US dollar.
The case involved four girls, 14 to 16 years old, who were trafficked from their homes in Manila to the bar and forced to work as “guest relation officers”.
They were rescued in February 2007 by the National Bureau of Investigation, which acted on the tip of one girl who had escaped and returned to Manila.
The conviction, only the second this year, is a much-needed boost in the fight against human trafficking in the Philippines.
In June, a woman was sentenced to life imprisonment for trafficking seven minors for sexual exploitation in a bar in Batangas, a province south of the capital.
– Let this be a warning against human traffickers that their glory days are over and that they must immediately stop. Whether here or abroad, the Inter-Agency Council against Trafficking [IACAT] will not leave any stone unturned in its efforts to fight the crime of human trafficking, acting chairman Ricardo Blancaflor said.
A major problem
According to the US State Department’s Human Rights Report in 2007, the Philippines was “a source, transit, and destination country for men, women, and children trafficked for the purposes of sexual exploitation and forced labour”.
NGOs and government agencies estimated that 300.000 to 400.000 women were trafficked annually.
The Department of Justice’s assistant prosecutor Severino Gaña, also a member of the IACAT, told IRIN that the latest conviction could not be more timely.
Representatives of the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons (OMCTP), a Washington-funded monitoring group, are to arrive in the Philippines on 8 December to check on the latest government efforts to implement the international Trafficking of Victims Act of 2000.
Since the law was passed in the Philippines in 2003, there have been 12 convictions under Republic Act 9208 or the Anti-Trafficking in Persons Act of 2003.
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