YEREVAN TO ADOPT NEW ANTI-TRAFFICKING PLAN
By Karine Kalantarian
Radio Liberty, Czech Rep.
Sept 5 2007
The Armenian authorities have stepped up the prosecution of individuals
involved in human trafficking and will soon adopt a new three-year plan
of actions against the illegal practice, officials said on Wednesday.
A similar program was already launched in 2004 and supposedly completed
at the end of last year.
The Armenian government began tackling the problem under pressure
from the United States which has repeatedly described Armenia has a
major source of illegal transport of women for sexual exploitation
abroad. But despite its efforts, Armenia remains on a special "watch
list" of nations which the U.S. State Department says are not doing
enough to combat trafficking.
Speaking at a seminar in Yerevan, senior Armenian officials insisted
that the government has already made progress in reducing the scale
of the practice. Deputy Foreign Minister Armen Bayburtian said it
is currently discussing and will approve the new anti-trafficking
program later this month.
According to Deputy Prosecutor-General Mnatsakan Sargsian, the number
of trafficking-related criminal cases more than doubled to 32 between
2004 and 2006. He said law-enforcement bodies opened 20 such cases
in the first half of this year.
Sargsian did not specify the number of individuals imprisoned or
fined for such crimes.
In an annual global report on human trafficking released last year,
the State Department said that the Armenian authorities "failed to
impose significant penalties for convicted traffickers" and that
only a handful of them ended up in jail. Report also pointed to an
independent journalistic investigation that implicated a member of
a special anti-trafficking unit at the Prosecutor-General’s Office
in extorting bribes from Armenian pimps and prostitutes operating in
the United Arab Emirates.
The Prosecutor-General’s Office said earlier in 2006 that it has
investigated the allegations and found them baseless.
Dzyunik Aghajanian, another senior Foreign Ministry official
attending the seminar, said Washington exaggerates the seriousness
of the problem in Armenia for political reasons. "We really have
[trafficking-related] problems in terms of public awareness and in
relation to the law-enforcement and judicial systems," she said. "But
they are not so serious as to justify our classification [by the
State Department.] Very often such classifications have a certain
political subtext."
Bayburtian, for his part, claimed that the U.S. and other Western
donors are not always helping Armenia to fight against local
prostitution rings. "We see numerous duplications and other forced
actions that do not take into sufficient consideration the country’s
priorities. This somewhat hinders the effectiveness of our efforts both
at the local and international levels," he said without elaborating.