Conference on human trafficking opens

"I am young - but up here is old," says an 11-year-old girl working as a prostitute in Cape Town, pointing to her head - one of many images in hard-hitting footage on the sex industry, screened at the opening of a conference on human trafficking in South Africa on Tuesday. The three-day conference, 'The Next Steps to Path Breaking Strategies in the Global Fight Against Sex Trafficking', is sponsored by a global coalition of NGOs called the War Against Trafficking Alliance and the South African National Prosecuting Authority (NPA). The gathering will help to compile the agenda of a national task team newly constituted to combat human trafficking in South Africa, and is the fifth follow-up of a world summit held in Washington last year. South Africa is a destination for women and children from Kenya, Latvia, Malawi, Mozambique, Nigeria, Senegal, Taiwan, Thailand, Romania and Zambia, said US Congresswoman Linda Smith, the founder of the global coalition, at the opening of the conference. Children are trafficked either for sexual exploitation or for labour. Smith, quoting last year's US State Department figures, said there were 2,000 children in debt bondage in South Africa. According to Interpol, sex traffickers earn an extimated US $19 billion annually. "It is diffcult to put a figure to the value of trade in Southern Africa, as we have only just begun investigating it," Jonathan Martens of the Geneva-based NGO, International Organisation for Migration (IOM), told IRIN. A pimp in Cape Town, South Africa's tourism capital, who supplies eight- to 11-year-olds to sex tourists mainly from the US, Britain and Japan, commented in the film that children are sometimes tied with barbed wire and told to perform sexual acts on adults. The footage was shot by the global coalition of NGOs. According to the South Africa-based child rights' activist organisation, Molo Songololo, 25 percent of prostitutes in Cape Town are children. While the film alleged that child prostitution in Cape Town was run predominantly by a Nigerian syndicate, Smith said Russian, Bulgarian and Chinese crime groups were other major players in the human trafficking business in South Africa. The country's attractive First World conditions - "clean water, good schools for their children" - were luring trafficking traders to the country, said Smith. Senior state advocate Nolwandle Qaba of the NPA, who heads the national trafficking task team, said they had identified "six pillars of the South African counter-trafficking strategy": "information; capacity-building and development; victim support and integration; legislation and policy; monitoring and evaluation; and liaison and consultation". The new task team, chaired by the NPA, comprises the departments of home affairs, justice, social services and labour, the organised crime and border police units of the South African Police Service, the UN Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Molo Songololo and IOM. None of the countries in Southern Africa have domestic legislation outlawing human trafficking. Senior legal crime expert in UNODC's Southern Africa office, Uglijesa Zvekic, said the UN body would launch a regional project in September to enable members of the Southern African Development Community to implement the protocol of the UN Convention against Transnational Organised Crime. The legal instrument, which was adopted by the General Assembly on 15 November 2000 and came into force on 25 December 2003, provides the first internationally agreed definition of trafficking and requires countries to criminalise such activity. Through a series of workshops, Zvekic said, the project would "advise on drafting and revising relevant legislation; provide advice and assistance on establishing and strengthening antitrafficking offices and units; and train law enforcement offices, prosecutors and judges". UNODC also planned to set up a programme in Mozambique next year to prevent trafficking in human organs.