Parliament expresses concern over human trafficking
Members of Parliament (MPs) yesterday expressed concern over the trafficking of persons, especially girls, for domestic work far away from home
and called for the resourcing of the Anti-Human Trafficking Unit (AHTU ) of the Ghana Police Service to enable it to deal with the problem.
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Contributing to a statement made on the floor of Parliament by the MP for Subin, Mr Isaac Osei, on the 2014 Trafficking In Persons Report, the MPs described human trafficking as an injustice perpetrated against men and women, boys and girls and said the conditions under which many of them worked were inhumane and amounted to modern-day slavery.
The report
The section of the report on Ghana puts the country on tier two, which means that the government does not comply fully with the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking.
It added that efforts were, however, being made to move into compliance.
The report identifies Ghana not only as a source and transit country for the trafficking of people but also a destination.
According to the report, intra-country trafficking was far more prevalent than transnational trafficking of persons.
It identified the Volta and the Western regions as places where children engaged in the sex trade, while fishing, especially on the Volta Lake, domestic service, begging, street hawking, portering, galamsey and agriculture were sectors where many young boys and girls were forced to work.
It stated that Ghanaian women, and to a lesser extent men, were recruited by dubious recruiting agencies and trafficked to Israel, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait where they were forced to work as domestic servants or engage in the sex trade.
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"Many Ghanaians are also forced into the sex trade by so-called benefactors who traffic them to Nigeria, Cote d'Ivoire, Burkina Faso, The Gambia and South Africa," the report stated.
It said there were many who came from different countries to Ghana, ostensibly voluntarily but ultimately ended up in the commercial sex trade.
It identified the source countries as Vietnam, China, Nigeria, Cote d'Ivoire, Burkina Faso and Benin.
Mr Osei
Mr Osei said even in advanced countries such as the UK, the US, Russia, France, Germany and Holland, there were many Ghanaians who had been encouraged to visit, with promises of work as domestic servants, live-ins, bar attendants amd cleaners, but were soon forced into sex work to pay off their minders or enforcers.
He said in the light of the facts available, there was the need to combat and eliminate the trafficking of persons into, through and outside of Ghana.
The Subin MP, presenting a grim picture of the enforcement situation in Ghana, intimated that although Ghana had passed the Human Trafficking Act, 2005 (Act 694) which prohibited all forms of trafficking, the Legislative Instrument (LI) to support the act had not been finalised.
The AHTU, he added, had not received any budgetary allocation to enable it to carry out its mandate.
"It is only able to carry out its mandate because of the support of local and international donors," he said.
The government, he said, had failed to provide funding for the required specialised training of personnel to increase the pool of trained personnel who could identify, apprehend and prosecute traffickers.
Statistics
Providing statistics on enforcement of the laws, Mr Osei said as many as 140 investigations, 20 prosecutions and six convictions were reported in 2009.
He said sentences ranging from 18 months to five years were handed down.
According to him, the Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection which has oversight responsibility for the government’s anti-trafficking efforts, received no dedicated budgetary allocation for the purpose for 2014 and so was unable to fulfil its mandate of collecting, collating, monitoring and evaluating trafficking data.
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He said Ghana had two shelters, one at Madina and the other at Osu, with both receiving no funding during 2014.
"Retrieved children cannot, therefore, be protected in those shelters and those there are vulnerable," he said.
He said Ghana had institutions to deal with the problem but those institutions were under-resourced.
He told the House that the US government was committing $5 million, under a programme to combat the menace of people trafficking in Ghana, and urged the country to find additional funds to make the programme successful.
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