Tuesday 24 September 2002

Press Briefing Notes
Tuesday 24 September 2002
Spokesperson: Jean Philippe Chauzy

ECUADOR - Labor Migration to Spain
DOMINICAN REPUBLIC - Counter Trafficking Seminar: The Need for Legislation
HELSINKI - New Counter-Trafficking Website





ECUADOR - Labour Migration to Spain - Officials of the Spanish Ministry of Labor and private employers are in Quito this week working with IOM on the
selection of the first group of 188 applicants for employment in Spain.

This group will be the first to fill 818 posts as per an agreement signed between the Governments of Ecuador and Spain in May of 2001.

Shortly after the agreement was signed, IOM offices began receiving the documents necessary and carrying out preliminary interviews with potential candidates. The IOM database currently has 17,070 names.

In Latin America, the 80's was considered a lost decade for economic growth. And Ecuador was no exception. But in the case of Ecuador, the 90s was also considered a lost decade. Between 1998 and 1999 the economy stagnated, resulting in zero economic growth. In 1999 unemployment soared to an all time high of 14.4 per cent. A financial crisis, coupled with the freezing of bank deposits, led to mass firings.

Lack of employment and economic uncertainty, drove more than 350,000 persons to flee the country in search of work. This represented 10 per cent of the work force.

Although the official unemployment rate has decreased, underemployment is on the rise as well as the number of persons working in the informal sector. Unemployment has fallen to 8.4 per cent. Experts are attributing this to a moderate economic recovery and to the large numbers of working-age people who have left the country. Of the total number of persons applying for employment in Spain, almost 75 per cent are currently employed. But the low wages are driving them to seek employment abroad.

According to Spanish Government figures, the number of Ecuadorians residing legally in Spain has climbed from 3,000 in 1996 to 135,000 by April 2002. But the Spanish government has acknowledged that there may another 100,000 Ecuadorians in Spain without proper documents.

The IOM staff working with the Spanish delegation providing the files of the potential candidates that will be interviewed. After the candidates are chosen, IOM will work on the drafting of the contracts, will secure visas, passports and the airline tickets for the journey to Spain.

The labor migrants will be employed in the agricultural and hospitality sectors and in domestic services.
All labor migrants arriving in Spain from Ecuador will have a legal contract and will be entitled to all social benefits given to legal residents, such as social security and family reunification.

DOMINICAN REPUBLIC - Counter Trafficking Seminar: The Need for Legislation - On Thursday the IOM office in Santo Domingo is holding a public seminar on Counter Trafficking and the need for effective legislation. As there is currently no provision on the trafficking of persons in the existing Dominican penal code, it is virtually impossible for victims to go to court and arrested traffickers are difficult to prosecute.

Assistant Deputy Attorney General of the United States Department of Justice, Alexander Acosta and the Dominican Attorney General, Virgilio Bello Rosa and Yadira Henriquez of the State Secretary for Women will address the participants.

Acosta's visit and the seminar are part of IOM's Programme to Prevent and Combat Trafficking of Women in the Dominican Republic. The US Assistant Deputy Attorney General will also hold working sessions with representatives of public institutions and civil society organizations to discuss the main aspects of an effective counter-trafficking legislation.

Government officials and staff of private institutions involved in counter trafficking will attend the seminar. It is co-organized with the Attorney General's Office, the State Secretariat for Women, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Inter-Institutional Committee for the Protection of Migrant Women, and the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences.

Besides advocacy and technical assistance activities regarding the preparation of legislation, IOM's programme includes public information campaigns on the risks of trafficking, training of government personnel and civil society leaders, and return and reintegration assistance of victims of trafficking.

Since the beginning of the programme, IOM has assisted 45 victims of trafficking to return home from Argentina. IOM estimates that as many as 1,000 may need urgent assistance to return home.

IOM's Chief of Mission Juan Artola says, "In the past few years Argentina had become the new destination for trafficked Dominican women. In February we began receiving information confirming the dramatic situation of the some 5,000 Dominican women currently in Argentina. This coincided with the economic crisis in that country, so many migrants are desperate to return home."

The Dominican Republic, the Philippines, Brazil and Colombia are considered to be important source countries from where women are fraudulently recruited with bogus jobs offers and then trafficked to Western Europe where they are enslaved in the sex industry.

It is estimated that more than 70,000 Dominican women are involved in the sex industry abroad, the majority of them victims of trafficking. The main countries of destination are the Dutch Antilles in the Caribbean, Spain, the Netherlands, Italy, Germany and Switzerland, and more recently Argentina.

In the past few months IOM has organized counter-trafficking training workshops for the members of the Inter-institutional Committee for the Protection of Migrant Women, composed of 15 public institutions and NGOs. In the coming months IOM will carry out an information campaign in targeted locations in the Dominican Republic and compile legal information for the drafting of new legislation. IOM is working in close partnership with public and non-governmental institutions in the destination countries to offer protection and assistance to Dominican women abroad.

The IOM counter trafficking programme is funded by the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration of the US Department of State.

HELSINKI - New Counter-Trafficking Website - A new IOM Website focusing on human trafficking in the Baltic region launches this week. www.focus-on- trafficking.net, which appears in English, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian and Russian, is part of IOM's ongoing anti-trafficking information campaign in the Baltics and is funded by SIDA, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency.

The site is designed for a wide range of users - not only people at risk from human trafficking, but also specialists working in the areas of counter-trafficking, human rights and gender issues, as well as the media.

Information on the site will include practical advice about safe ways of finding a job abroad and useful contacts in foreign countries. A recent IOM survey found that 37% of young people polled in Estonia, 18% in Latvia and 16% in Lithuania said that they would use the Internet when searching for a job abroad.

Growing Internet use in the Baltic states means that human traffickers now also use the web as a medium to recruit women, many of whom subsequently find themselves enslaved in prostitution rings in Western Europe.

The new Website counters this by highlighting some of the dangers of accepting offers of employment abroad without properly checking the source, or accepting an illegal job in a foreign country.

The site will also carry news reports on human trafficking in the Baltic region, research on trafficking, information on counter-trafficking legislation and links to relevant organizations.