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     News: UK demands crackdown on sex trafficking

    Human TraffickingOrigionally published politics.guardian.co.uk/eu/story/0,9061,1408818,00.html

    Ed Vulliamy
    Wednesday February 9, 2005

    The solicitor general, Harriet Harman, will today launch a drive to galvanise a European-wide crackdown on trafficking in young women and girls for enforced prostitution, urging closer international cooperation between prosecutors

    Ms Harman said in an interview with the Guardian that law enforcement had to undertake a radical approach whereby men who have sex with under-age and trafficked women will be liable to prosecution.

    Ms Harman, who has been assigned a special anti-trafficking portfolio by the attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, will make her pitch today at a meeting in The Hague of Eurojust, the EU body formed in 2002 which brings together public prosecution services. She will present a three-part plan to combat trafficking, comprising protection for victims, more effective prosecution of traffickers and seizing proceeds of the crime.

    "There is only the prospect of the trafficking situation getting worse unless we do something about it," she said. "Either more lives are going to be ruined, or we have to face this and crack down."

    Trafficking in young women and girls is one of the fastest-burgeoning international crimes, "organised by serious criminals", Ms Harman said, "and part of the financing of serious organised crime.

    "I call it modern-day slavery: it is about the exploitation of women and children and the exploitation of people from developing countries, and anyone who is concerned about these things has got to be concerned about this agenda."

    European countries, she said, "have to work together. We have to coordinate. Trafficking is by definition an international crime. We are talking about women of one nationality dragged across Europe by traffickers of another nationality. Cases might have jurisdiction in one country, evidence in another and witnesses in another.

    "We need to create a pan-European prosecution effort through Eurojust. Eurojust is there, now it is about focusing Eurojust on trafficking".'

    The Council of Europe has finalised wording for a binding convention on trafficking, affording protection of victims and facilitating prosecution, which opens for ratification in May.

    There is debate as to whether Britain should or will ratify, having opted out of an EU directive on trafficking last year.

    "I can't see why we shouldn't ratify," Ms Harman said, "as we are doing these things anyway.

    "But whether or not we ratify is not my top priority. My top priority is to galvanise a Europe-wide effort to to tackle human trafficking and get things done."

    On the domestic front, Ms Harman is urging greater resources to combat trafficking and protection for victims from deportation. "Belmarsh [detention centre] is heaving with people who have been trafficked. The problem is one of resources, not one of law. What we don't want is a situation in which the victim is deported, no doubt only to be retrafficked.

    "When trafficking is seen as part of immigration you get this idea that we are somehow victims of trafficked people. But it is the trafficked people who are the victims; and we are part of the problem: the fact is that there are people in Britain who are using the trafficked women - we are part of the demand side." The point brings Ms Harman to a radical innovation in prosecution policy, what she calls "a major challenge to the notion of consent to sex. We have got to look at the prosecution of users".

    "We have got to ask whether there should be immunity for people who use a woman who has been tricked or abducted, dragged across Europe, beaten and often raped as a means of breaking her down.

    "An estimated 80% of prostitutes in London are foreign. The idea that these are women who have chosen to sell sex is clearly wrong. There is the issue of consent.

    She added: "The people who purchase their services would not regard themselves as criminals, but they are the demand side of terrible criminal exploitation."

    In practice, Ms Harman's plan means that "when a place is raided, you don't necessarily just grab the pimp. You grab the user, if there is a girl crying who can't speak English. It's too easy to turn a blind eye to the demand side. I don't think we can, and we are not."



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