Friday, June 22 2012

THE Police Service is working closely with the Immigration Department, Interpol and the International Organisation of Migration (IOM) on the issue of human trafficking, Police Service information officer Sgt Wayne Mystar said yesterday at the daily police press briefing at Police Administration Building in Port-of-Spain.

Mystar said the police in partnership with these organisations have been working to collect and collate all information on persons who may have illegally entered the country and who may have been found in brothels, clubs and other places of ill-repute.

He said information is also being gathered with respect to missing persons to identify whether there are persons who are in fact being trafficked in or out of TT or to identify any pattern. Mystar added the police is also in the process of implementing administrative guidelines and had trained over 700 police officers on the issue of human trafficking.

“We are closely monitoring reports of missing persons and aggressively pursuing intelligence gathering on this issue. Many of the issues raised by Mystar at the briefing were contained in the 2012 Trafficking in Persons report which was released by the United States (US) State Department earlier this week. In that report, the State Department said the problem of child sex tourism has not been considered to be a problem in TT.

TT is on a Tier II list which is for countries not fully compliant with the minimum standards for the elimination of human trafficking. The State Department said, “The Government (of TT) did not undertake measures to reduce the demand for commercial sex acts, such as an awareness campaign targeted at clients of the sex trade. Authorities did not consider child sex tourism to be a problem and no such cases were identified, investigated, or prosecuted during the reporting period.”