The Trafficking of Humans

by Fr Shay Cullen

[Photo: Wikipedia]

A few weeks ago, 69 Vietnamese victims of human trafficking were found in the Philippines. These migrants had been brought from Vietnam two at a time on a tourist visa by a syndicate and made to work for three years on low wages or none at all by human traffickers. They were then abandoned by their gang-masters, declared indigent and deported.

The Philippines is now a destination for low-paid or even slave labor as if it didn’t have enough itself. The Philippines is mostly a source of human trafficking victims both internal and international.

There is significant trafficking from the Philippines to South Korea using E6 visas and also to Japan as an entertainer. What happens to the thousands of young Filipino women there is anybody’s guess.

The Philippines is doing more to combat the trade in persons and has finally reached the US Tier 1 status and is among the top 39 countries whose government‘s fully meet the US minimum standards of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act. This has only been achieved this 2016 after many years on the Tier 2 Watchlist. At one stage a few years ago, the Philippines was on the verge of dropping to Tier 3, a very low standard of compliance indeed.

The Trafficking in Persons Report for 2016 issued for every country in the world by the US State Department states that being on Tier 1 does not mean there is no human trafficking, just that the government is meeting the minimum standards.

Full post here.