Trafficking tie-up?

Jun 23, 2010 Editorial

To say that the latest US State Department’s Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report on Guyana has raised the hackles of local officials is to engage in the most sublime of understatements. Words like “crap”, “eye-pass” and “sinister” are not in the diplomatic lexicon usually deployed to describe the actions of a friendly state – which, not so incidentally, is also the last superpower left standing.
It is not too difficult, however, to feel a twinge of sympathy for the government. The TIP initiative is, in its entirety, an American undertaking. Now a decade old, the program is executed by the State Department and consists primarily of a report that is issued annually on its assessment of how every country in the world – even those that it officially has nothing to do with, such as Cuba – is addressing trafficking in persons for the purpose of sex or forced labour.
Countries are rated as being in one of three “Tiers” – with Tier 1 being the best and Tier 3, the worst. Apart from the moral stigmatisation in the international community, a Tier 3 categorisation can cause a country to be blacklisted from a host of programs sponsored by the US. From the moment we came under TIP radar a few years ago, we were adjudged to be in Tier 2 – and told in no uncertain terms that we had better clean up our act, or else. The government immediately acknowledged that while indeed, Guyana did have cases of human trafficking – like every other country in the world – the incidence was not such as to justify a Tier 2 ranking.
To its credit, the government moved energetically to deal with the problem by addressing the few identified lacunae. Legislation (the Combating Trafficking of Persons Act) was drafted, debated and passed into law in 2005, with amazing (for Guyana) alacrity. In 2006, it resuscitated the facility of the Health and Shelter organisation that had fallen into disuse through lack of funding. In addition to providing a refuge for battered victims of domestic abuse, there was wide publicity given to its new openness towards victims of TIP. One hundred persons in eight regions were trained to identify and report possible incidents of TIP.
The government also, in 2007, established a National Task Force for Combating Trafficking in Persons (NTF-TIP) consisting of personnel from within the Civil Service and from involved NGOs. Ironically, only last month the NTF-TIP announced that its work had shown that in 2009, out of ten suspicious cases, eight had been referred to the police and one eventually prosecuted and convicted (this year).
What has appeared to trouble the US is the small number of persons that have been charged and prosecuted, even after the government made its interventions – which the reports consistently acknowledged and approved. Reports noted six cases being investigated in 2007, eight in 2008 and four in 2009 and complained that “legal cases against alleged trafficking offenders usually did not progress through the trial phase, as charges against most suspects are dropped prior or during the prosecution.”
Not unreasonably, not even being permitted to view the source information from which their reports are compiled, government spokespersons have pointed out that it would appear that the US government wanted them to not only manufacture incidents of TIP but also intervene into the judicial process to ensure conviction.
The NTF-TIP report before the latest contretemps stated quite caustically, “Every citizen is guaranteed the right to be presumed innocent until found guilty by a court of competent jurisdiction. We hold this presumption and its constitutional guarantee very dear to us. It must be protected at all times.”
Addressing one sore point in its TIP exercise, for the first time the US government rated its own performance – and gave itself a Tier 1. Critics pointed out that to enhance the credibility of its report, it should have shared its methodology with another country – and asked that country to conduct the assessment. In the absence of transparency of the compilation of the report, it is difficult to even rebut the conspiracy aficionados who suggest that the TIP report is just another tool of “neo-colonialism”.

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