Sharp rise in trafficking arrests

More than 230 crimes connected to human trafficking were registered in Tajikistan in 2005, compared to 150 similar crimes a year earlier, Deputy Prosecutor General Abdusami Dadabaev said at a conference in the Tajik capital, Dushanbe, on Tuesday. The one-day conference – ‘Mobilisation of communities in the struggle against human traffic in Tajikistan’ - was organised by the presidency’s Strategic Research Centre. “Since the beginning of the present year, 80 victims of trafficking, mostly from the United Arab Emirates (UAE), have been returned home. We have arrested 45 people for hiring women for sexual exploitation, Dadabaev said. The prosecutor general noted that a number of factors impeded investigation into such crimes, including lack of cooperation from victims, a lack of bilateral agreements with certain countries, insufficient legislation and a lack of experience in this type of crime on the part of the police and judiciary. “The number of such crimes is definitely increasing,” Ubaidullo Sharipov, a human trafficking specialist at the Ministry of Internal Affairs, said at the conference. According to one International Organization for Migration (IOM) report, over 700,000 women and children are trafficked across borders each year worldwide. Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) countries are becoming the most important geographical source of trafficking in women in Asia, with the Central Asian states of Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan being no exception. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, economic hardship and widespread unemployment made the desire to emigrate abroad even stronger, providing a more conducive environment for traffickers to recruit, cheat, abuse and exploit their victims.