WASHINGTON: Pakistan is making significant efforts to eliminate human trafficking, says the official US Trafficking in Persons report for 2017.

The State Department, which prepares the report for Congress, granted Pakistan a waiver, allowing it to stay in the tier two watch list for the fourth consecutive year.

The watch list includes countries whose governments do not fully meet the standards to prevent trafficking, but are making significant efforts to do so.

Without a waiver, Pakistan would have been delegated to tier three, which brings certain sanctions under a US law called Trafficking Victims Protection Act 2000.

This year’s report points out that the government of Pakistan does not fully meet the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking; however, “it demonstrated significant efforts during the reporting period (2016) by increasing investigations, prosecutions, and convictions of sex trafficking”.

The government has devoted sufficient resources to a written plan that, if implemented, would constitute significant efforts to meet the minimum standards, the report adds.

It notes that the government amended its national strategic framework against trafficking in persons and human smuggling to extend it through 2020 and ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child Optional Protocol on Armed Conflict.

Sindh adopted a law prohibiting bonded labour and both Sindh and Punjab passed legislation criminalising child sex trafficking and forced labour with sufficiently stringent sentences.

In November last year, Balochistan passed legislation establishing District Child Protection Units, which are charged with providing case management and ensuring that abused children, including trafficking victims, receive appropriate government services.

Punjab opened its first wholly-integrated women’s shelter for victims of violence and Sindh increased its budget for women’s shelters. Punjab reported it identified and removed approximately 79,000 children working in brick kilns, some of whom may have been victims of bonded labour.

But the report also notes that the government did not demonstrate increasing efforts compared to the previous reporting period. Overall, government law enforcement efforts on labour trafficking remained inadequate. Despite bonded labour being Pak­is­tan’s largest trafficking problem, only Punjab reported convictions for bonded labour and the total number was low — 10 convictions in 2016 compared with seven in 2015.

The report also deals with Pakistani men and women who migrate voluntarily to the Gulf states and Europe for low-skilled employment but some become victims of labour trafficking. False job offers and high recruitment fees charged by illegal labour agents or sub-agents of licensed Pakistani overseas employment promoters entrap Pakistanis into sex trafficking and bonded labour. Some Pakistani children and adults with disabilities are forced to beg in Iran.

Published in Dawn, July 3rd, 2017