Three CARICOM countries in top tier of US trafficking in persons report

WASHINGTON, (CMC):

Three Caribbean Community (CARICOM) countries have been listed in the top tier of the 2024 Trafficking in Persons (TIP) report, released by the United States State Department on Monday.

Washington said that the governments in The Bahamas, Suriname and Guyana have fully met the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 (TVPA), which provides a framework to identify and help individuals who may have experienced trafficking.

The report names Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Belize, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, St.Lucia, and St Vincent and the Grenadines in Tier 2, with the governments in these countries not fully meeting the TVPA’s minimum standards, but are making significant efforts to bring themselves into compliance with those standards.

In addition, countries are placed on Tier 2 in situations where the estimated number of victims of severe forms of trafficking is very significant, or is significantly increasing and the country is not taking proportional concrete actions.

In addition, there is a failure to provide evidence of increasing efforts to combat severe forms of trafficking in persons from the previous year, including increased investigations, prosecutions, and convictions of trafficking crimes; increased assistance to victims; and decreasing evidence of complicity in severe forms of trafficking by government officials.

No CARICOM country is listed on Tier 3, where governments do not fully meet the TVPA’s minimum standards and are not making significant efforts to do so.

However, the report notes that the French-speaking CARICOM country of Haiti, which has been without an elected president since the assassination of President Jovenel Moise in July 2021, and where criminal gangs are engaged in attempts to overthrow the government, has been placed under the heading ‘Special Case’, along with Yemen, Somalia and Libya.

The report did not elaborate on that category.

Human trafficking include sex trafficking, in which a commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud, or coercion, or in which the person induced to perform such an act has not attained 18 years of age.

It is also defined as the recruitment, harbouring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for labour or services, through the use of force, fraud, or coercion for the purpose of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery.