News & Events

Workshop for Foreign Service Officials

CeLRRd held two workshops on 7 and 11 August 2009 respectively at Hotel Royal Singi and Hotel Manang respectively, for foreign service officials for strengthening victim and witness protection for successful prosecution of traffickers. Altogether 28 participants from Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Nepal Police, Judiciary, Office of the Attorney General, NGOs working against human trafficking and Defense Lawyers participated in the workshop. Dr Yubaraj Sangroula, Associate Professor, KSL and Geeta Pathak Sangroula, President, CeLRRd and Rajesh Jha, Psychologist were the resource persons and Kapil Aryal, Coordinator of the programme facilitated in the workshop.

Each workshop focused on the basic concept of human trafficking with reference to “Human Trafficking and Transportation Control Act 2064”. Discussions were also done on international laws and standards and their applications in Nepalese context, and protecting the trafficking victims from psychosocial problems and trauma during repatriation processes. Few challenges were also identified by the foreign service officials to develop coordination mechanism for effective repatriation: a) Mentality of lawmakers and stakeholders that only the girls are trafficked, thereby giving less priority to other vulnerable section of population like children and ignorant youths, whose organ can be extracted through false promise, or they can be trafficked for forced labour; b) Lack of coordination amongst governments of the country of origin and destination; c) No mechanism of providing psychosocial counseling to trafficking victim in Nepalese Embassy or counselor's office; d) Nepalese authorities and government are unable to protect Nepalese citizen from exploitation at workplaces abroad; e) Trend of Nepalese like not making contact with Foreign Service Officials (FSO) until they face hardships in foreign land; f) Non cooperation from the government of country of destination to repatriate trafficking victims; g) Difficulty in identifying offenders by victims; h) Trend of irregular migration or human smuggling converting into human trafficking, thus confusing FSO whether to take legal action against the illegal migrant or to repatriate and compensate considering the person as victim of human trafficking; i) Insufficient budget with Embassies and FSO, and lack of shelter or transit homes and similar others.

Responding to the needs, the workshop identified following solutions to the above-mentioned problems: adequate budget and training to the Embassies and FSO to deal with these problems; strengthen border security; develop and update database of traffickers to help track them; built transit homes and rehabilitation shelters in sufficient numbers; government should support those NGOs who wish to build transit homes and rehabilitation shelters; undertake a comprehensive research to link the trends of human trafficking in the guise of foreign employment; sensitize media on its positive role to help repatriate trafficking victims; amend laws to make government responsible for compensating the victim, in case an offender is not arrested or the offender doesn't have property; hold regular meetings of all the stakeholders to share problems, challenges and experiences.