TIP Catch-22

The US just issued its 2012 report on “Trafficking in Persons” (TIP) and it is certain to raise the hackles of Guyanese officialdom once again. As we reported earlier this week,  “Guyana remains at Tier Two in the U.S. ranking for countries in the fight against TIP. A Tier Two ranking means a country’s government does not fully comply with the U.S. Trafficking Victims Protection Act’s minimum standards, but is making significant efforts to bring itself into compliance with those standards.
Just before the release of this report, the Minister of Home Affairs had strongly rejected the allegation of Mr David Granger, the leader of APNU and the parliamentary Opposition, that Guyana was not ‘doing enough’ in the fight against TIP. Mr Rohee asserted, “Although trafficking in persons is certainly not rampant in Guyana, significant efforts have been adopted by Government to combat this phenomenon.”  Interestingly, as indicated from the above quote from  the US concurs that the Guyana government has been taking steps to deal with the TIP problem. The disagreement is on how widespread is the phenomenon.
Part of the problem is definitional. The UN Palermo Protocol states that TIP is (a) […] the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation. Exploitation shall include, at a minimum, the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labour or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs; (b) The consent of a victim of trafficking in persons to the intended exploitation set forth (above) shall be irrelevant where any of the means (above) have been used; and (c) The recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of a child for the purpose of exploitation shall be considered “trafficking in persons” even if this does not involve any of the means set forth above.” By this definition it was estimated that over 2.5 million persons from 127 countries were being trafficked.
Even Wikipedia had to admit, “However, it is argued that many of these statistics are grossly inflated to aid advocacy of anti-trafficking NGOs and the anti-trafficking policies of governments. Due to the definition of trafficking being a process (not a singly defined act) and the fact that it is a dynamic phenomenon with constantly shifting patterns relating to economic circumstances, much of the statistical evaluation is flawed.”
One flaw from a Guyanese standpoint is how “illegal transportation” of persons into the US is reported. The US defines this as ‘alien smuggling” and in so doing the 2012 TIP claims that approximately 2000 cases were pursued in 2011. But in point of fact, if the definition of TIP above is adhered to consistently, then even though the thousands of persons from Guyana ‘consent’ to be transported to the US by ‘backtrackers”, they are coerced and threatened in the US into paying the exorbitant fees.  Relatives in Guyana who made contact for the ‘smuggling’ are also threatened and menaced. There are numerous instances of females and children being abused during the smuggling operations.
The catch-22 for Guyana persons being trafficked is that even while the government struggles to comply with standards defined by the US, individuals such as Glen Lall (who the then political officer in the U.S. Embassy in Georgetown, Benjamin Canavan described in a WikiLeaks cable as a person with a “sketchy past” allegedly involved in “alien smuggling” and “links to the underworld”) are allowed not only to travel unimpeded to the US but to boast of his connections with the local US Embassy.
If the US does not want to take action, the Guyana government must.