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POSTVIEW Report on human trafficking praises Czechs The Prague Post (June 24, 2004) The government might be on the verge of collapse due to a lack of internal support within the ruling party, but it still has something to celebrate. The Czech Republic is the only former Eastern bloc state listed as a Tier 1 country in the just released U.S. Report on Human Trafficking. That ranking, on a four-tier scale, indicates that the country is doing everything possible -- prevention, victim aid, prosecution, arrest -- to curtail the crime of human trafficking, which traps thousands of men, women and children in forced labor and sexual servitude each year. In the Czech Republic human trafficking is linked to street prostitution and forced sex work in the country's more than 200 brothels. The victims are primarily from the poorest ex-Soviet states, such as Ukraine and Moldova. U.S. Embassy political officer and trafficking expert Ben Rockwell did castigate the country on two points, however. First, sentencing in the Czech Republic, as in many countries, is too light, according to Rockwell. And despite excellent police work, he said, far too few traffickers are actually charged. Out of the five persons convicted of human trafficking last year, four were sentenced to jail time, but all of the sentences were suspended. "Judges and prosecutors still do not really know how to apply the trafficking law, which was only passed in 2000," Rockwell explained. The bigger problem, as Rockwell acknowledged, is that the country has developed a reputation as the brothel of Europe, with cheap flights fueling sex tourism. Traffickers see a great business opportunity in the Czech Republic. And if prosecutors and judges do not start to take the issue seriously, the Czech Republic could become even more of a trafficker's heaven, Tier 1 rating or not. Rockwell and the trafficking report also criticized the government's plan to submit a bill to the Chamber of Deputies to legalize prostitution. Although the Interior Ministry insists that legalization and the regulations that come with it would eliminate trafficking, Rockwell argues that this assumption is counterintuitive. "If a country becomes a legal haven for prostitution, then traffickers will be in greater demand. And there will always be people who want to avoid paying taxes and higher fees to prostitutes, so there will be an underground market for illegal prostitutes," he said. Jitka Gjuricova, the Interior Ministry's prostitution expert, says the claim of a link between trafficking and prostitution is not based on real evidence. "Legalization helps distinguish between persons involved in prostitution forcibly and voluntarily," she said, adding that legalization also reduces the number of prostitutes. "Since prostitution was legalized in Holland in 2000, the number of window prostitutes in Amsterdam has decreased by one-third." The question is whether that one-third has gone underground and can now be tapped through other means, such as mobile-phone escort services. "Where prostitution is legalized, a black market in trafficking emerges," the U.S. report asserts, "as exploiters seek to maximize profit by avoiding the scrutiny and regulatory costs of the legal prostitution market." The Brussels-based European Women's Lobby, representing hundreds of nongovernmental organizations, has also taken an anti-prostitution stand. It supports the approach of Sweden, which since 1999 has vigorously prosecuted prostitutes' clients. Since then, according to the Stockholm police, street prostitution has declined by 70 percent to 90 percent and brothel prostitution by half. It is hard to tell who is right, the Americans or the Czechs. But it is far from a merely academic or political question: Finding the right solution to the trafficking crisis in the former Soviet bloc could save the lives of thousands of women in the future. |
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