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| Vincentian Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves insisted "St Vincent does not have trafficking of persons." (Photo: iisd.ca) | |
KINGSTOWN, St Vincent, June 19, 2009 - Two Caribbean countries, Guyana and St Vincent and the Grenadines, have strongly objected to being placed on the United States Department of Statement watch list for human trafficking.
Vincentian Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves told Parliament yesterday that he was so upset by the country being placed in the second tier watch list in the department's 2009 Trafficking in Persons (TIP) report, that he had written to US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton expressing the government's displeasure and had also held discussions with the Chargé d'Affaires of the United States Embassy to Barbados and the Eastern Caribbean, Brent Hardt.
"There is no evidential basis for the placement of St Vincent and the Grenadines on any such watch list," he said, adding that the State Department had acted unfairly and arbitrarily and that whoever prepared the report did so based on "hearsay, unreliable information and some mischief making possibly by some busy-bodies".
"St Vincent does not have trafficking of persons," Gonsalves insisted.
The report stated that St Vincent and the Grenadines is a potential source country for children trafficked internally for the purposes of sexual exploitation and may also be a destination country for women trafficked for the purposes of Commercial sexual exploitation.
The State Department also claimed: "A traditional practice of sending children away from home to live with another family is sometimes misused for the purpose of coercing children into commercial sexual exploitation. In these situations, care-givers force fostered children into sexual relationships in exchange for financial and in-kind compensation."
Over in Guyana, the Ministerial Task Force on Trafficking in Persons said it firmly rejected the country's classification as well.
The Task Force said it seriously questioned the authenticity of the report based on its heavy reliance on second-hand data. It said the document raised questions about the quality of the sources of information.
It said in a press release that the architects of the report are less willing to use information from official sources and prefer to base their reports mainly on "other sources", some of which may have strong anti-government agendas and have already demonstrated their partiality to embellish issues for political reasons.
It added that the extensive grassroot network that government has developed to support the fight against the scourge has given no indication that it was a problem as described in the US TIP report.
In fact, the Task Force said, there were only two reports of persons presumed to be trafficked in 2008, and two persons were charged early in January 2009 for human trafficking.
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