Photo: Adel Yahya/IRIN. African migrants in Yemen
Source: IRIN
A Yemeni draft law envisaging strict penalties for those involved in
trafficking migrants, including kidnapping them and demanding ransom,
may finally bring an end to decades of exploitation.
To give the process a push, the International Labour Organization (ILO) co-hosted a three-day workshop from
6-8 September with Yemen’s Ministry of Human Rights in Lebanon’s
capital Beirut, bringing together government entities, international
agencies, and non-governmental groups to develop Yemen’s
anti-trafficking roadmap.
“Trafficking is a security problem - and a social problem, a human
rights problem, a foreign relations problem,” said Fouad AlGhaffari,
director-general of the office of the minister of human rights. “It’s
about the rights of women, of children, of everybody.”
As of July, 37,971 migrants and refugees had reportedly crossed the Red
Sea to Yemen since the beginning of the year, according to the Regional Mixed Migration Secretariat (RMMS), many of them Ethiopians trying to reach job opportunities in Saudi Arabia despite a recent toughening of
border controls and immigration rules in that country. Thousands of
Somalis seeking protection also continue to cross every year, with
230,878 currently in Yemen, according to the UN Refugee Agency.
Migrants usually leave their home countries of their own free will, but
are often sold to armed gangs by their smugglers upon arrival in Yemen.
The traffickers transfer the migrants to holding camps, where they are
held in horrific conditions, and women and girls are frequently
subjected to sexual abuse. Both men and women report being brutally tortured and beaten until relatives pay a ransom for their release.
From the beginning of 2013, cases of migrants being held until they pay up rose drastically, according to RMMS. After being freed, migrants often work difficult, low-paying jobs or try to find their way to another country.
With support from ILO, Yemen’s Ministry of Human Rights (MHR) has joined
forces with the ministries of defence, justice, interior, and planning,
among others, to establish a National Dialogue Committee on Combating
Trafficking. The committee will work to see the new anti-trafficking
bill become law, conduct research on the extent of trafficking in Yemen,
and roll out a comprehensive national strategy by 2015.
“To have Yemen, which sees in its country serious violation of human
rights, take this issue on, already speaks for itself as something we
can commend,” said Helene Harroff-Tavel from the ILO’s regional office
in the Arab states in Beirut.
She added, however, that progress would not be easy. “The legislative
challenge is a big one because there are so many competing priorities
[for the government],” said Harroff-Tavel.
Alongside the proposed trafficking law, the government is also seeking
to change legislation to set a minimum age of 18 for marriage in order
to end the practice of Yemeni girls being married and exploited,
particularly by visitors from richer Gulf States. Yemen is one of the
few countries without a legal minimum age for marriage. The draft law on
child marriage has encountered political opposition in Yemen’s Council
of Ministers; and campaigners say this will only complicate efforts to
stem sexual exploitation of minors as part of a trafficking law.
But human rights activists warn that even if the challenges of getting
the law passed are overcome, the country’s political divisions and
insecurity could limit its impact.
Hurdles ahead
In May, Human Rights Watch's (HRW) Yemen office released a report alleging the complicity of government officials in trafficking operations.
The report documented cases of payoffs at checkpoints and bribes to
criminal investigation departments and security forces to ensure they
turned a blind eye to traffickers, and even the involvement of
government officials in holding migrants in captivity before turning
them over to traffickers for money. According to the report, not a
single trafficker has been successfully prosecuted. “This industry
cannot exist without government complicity on multiple levels,” HRW’s
Yemen researcher, Belkis Wille, told IRIN. “So when you’re having a
discussion about this, you have to be discussing corruption among
officials.”
According to Wille, none of the government deliberations thus far have
included an admission of complicity in the trafficking trade, although
such discussions would be “essential to the strategy to combat
[trafficking]”.
Further challenges lie in accessing areas outside the government’s
control. After arriving on the Yemeni coastline, victims are often
transported in buses through northern portions of Yemen that fall under
the control of tribal groups.
“The traffickers in the north are tribal sheikhs - they are incredibly
powerful, well-connected families… with their own political clout,”
Wille said. The transitional central government has struggled to impose
its will on the country, particularly in the north and east.
Despite these obstacles, those involved in drafting the law remain
optimistic. “The government has adopted this totally,” said AlGhaffari.
“Yemen faces a lot of challenges, but I think there’s no excuse for not
following up on this.” Workshop participants were optimistic that the
new bill could become law before the end of the year.
Roadmap
The first step - submitting a bill on combating human trafficking to the Yemeni parliament - has been completed.
Although it still requires further review, the draft law is a vast
improvement on Yemen’s current infrastructure for dealing with
trafficking, says ILO. Drawing on international protocols and ILO
conventions, the draft law addresses multiple kinds of trafficking,
including for purposes of sexual and labour exploitation, with prisons
sentences of 5-15 years and heavy fines for those found guilty.
The participants in Beirut agreed to bring the draft law into line with ILO Convention 29 on Forced Labour as well as the International Protocol on Trafficking.
According to Torsten Schackel, ILO’s senior international labour
standards specialist, the draft law importantly includes provisions that
put an end to the prosecution of victims. “The victims are victimized
twice - first with being trafficked, then being faced with sanctions for
being illegally in the country,” said Shackel. To rectify this, the new
law includes articles on identifying victims and dealing with them
through the lens of protection, rather than prosecution.