HUMAN TRAFFICKING UPDATE

Sauce: http:// newsday.co.tt/2018/05/01/350-rescued-from-human-trafficking/

>350 rescued from human trafficking.

• an Interpol co-ordinated operation to bust an international human trafficking ring and rescue 350 potential victims of sexual exploitation and forced labour

• victims including men, women and minors were found working in nightclubs, farms, mines, factories and open-air markets.

• The other participating countries were Antigua and Barbuda, Aruba, Barbados, Belize, Brazil, Curacao, Guyana, Jamaica, St Lucia, St Vincent and the Grenadines, Turks and Caicos Islands and Venezuela (and Tt)

• In Guyana, young women were found working as prostitutes next to very remote gold mines and were kept from escaping. In St Vincent and the Grenadines, Asian “employees” at a factory were stripped of their passports and having never received any wages, were dependent on their handlers for the basic necessities including food.

*police officers in these countries arrested 22 people during Operation Libertad from April 3-9, as part of the Interpol Project to Combat Human Trafficking in the Caribbean.

• Director of the Counter-Trafficking Unit in the National Security Ministry Alana Wheeler has previously stated most of the cases of human trafficking in this country have been related to sexual exploitation and in December 2017, she reported human trafficking was happening in Tobago, with Venezuelan women being brought in to have sex with men on the island.