Visiting Vice President Jejomar Binay assured on Wednesday, February 2, the Philippines’ commitment to stem human trafficking and illegal recruitment, and promised to take the country off the US Trafficking of Persons watch list.
Binay, a Presidential Adviser on Overseas Filipino Workers Concerns, made the assurance Wednesday night, two days before his crucial meeting with the United States’ top official on human trafficking issues scheduled on Friday.
The meeting between Binay and Ambassador Luis CdeBaca, chief of the State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, is one of the high points of the vice president’s four-day visit to the United States.
His trip comes at a time when the United States has stepped up its efforts to curb human trafficking, a global problem that victimizes at least 12 million every year.
CdeBaca told a press briefing Tuesday that some countries, including some US “stratregic allies” were in grave danger of being further downgraded from Tier 2 to Tier 3 on the Human Trafficking watch list because they were not doing enough to stem what is considered a form of “modern-day slavery.”
“This year is the first year that the automatic downgrade provision, which is a feature of the 2008 Trafficking Victim Protections Act, is in place,” CdeBaca said.
“Countries that have been on Tier 2 Watch List, which is the next-to-last step of the report, for two consecutive years will have to either improve on the merits or be downgraded to Tier 3,” he added.
As Secretary Hillary Clinton suggested in the cabinet-level meeting on human trafficking, CdeBaca said, ranking another country is never an easy task, but turning away from an action in the face of modern slavery is intolerable.
The Philippines, a close ally and treaty partner of the United States, was listed in Tier 2 in 2009 and again in 2010. This means it could be downgraded to Tier 3, unless Manila could convince the US it has done better in stemming human trafficking and illegal recruitment.
Vice President Jejomar Binay who is currently in the US capital acknowledged the problem and assured that the Aquino administration “is doing its best to stem human trafficking and is sending guilty parties to jail.”
Binay also thanked the United States for hiring Filipino workers and for its commitment in safeguarding their rights.
He cited a report from the Inter-Agency Council Against Trafficking in Persons (IACAT) in Manila there have been “significant strides” in the prosecution of human traffickers and illegal recruiters.
From the last quarter of 2009 to the whole of last year, the IACAT report said, 15 persons have been convicted for violation of human trafficking laws.
“I assure you, this is just the beginning. We will go after them and we will not stop until these traffickers go to jail,” he told Washington DC-based Filipino journalists Wednesday night at a briefing in the Philippine embassy.
In fact, he said he was glad to know that a political officer from US embassy official attends the meetings of a top-level Philippine committee he chairs tasked to go after traffickers.
Binay said that as Presidential Adviser for OFW Concerns his main priorities are to prevent illegal recruitment and to prosecute illegal traffickers, adding that one way of doing this was to keep applicants engaged and informed of the rules and their rights.
It has been observed that “80 percent” of problems involving overseas Filipino workers are rooted in their “allowing themselves to get into questionable provisions,” like paying unauthorized and exorbitant placement fees.
In some cases, according to Overseas Workers Welfare Officer Adonis Duero, unwitting job applicants for overseas jobs are sweet-talked into coughing up excessive placement fees by illegal recruiters that do not exist, and they end up being stranded, jobless, and penniless abroad.
Duero, who is based at the Philippine Consulate in Los Angeles, has recommended that job orders being offered by recruiters to applicants be verified and double checked by labor authorities “before processing applications and before actual deployment of the workers to their job sites abroad.”
Such a meticulous system of checking and cross-checking, Duero explained, would weed out fake job offers as well as make sure they are still available when the OFWs are booked for their flights abroad.
Duero said that he has encountered cases of stranded OFWs who were handed their job contracts by the recruiters just before they board their planes to their destinations.
This illegal practice is being resorted to by the unscrupulous recruiters for a number of reasons, he said.
First, the recruiters make sure that “placement fees” called in local parlance as “lagay” are paid in full; and second, the workers are given little or no chance to back out, even when the salary they get is far less than the rate promised during the initial process of application.
Several victims of human trafficking this reporter has interviewed in the US said their recruiters “were so greedy they even asked for $100″ from the departing workers, which they had to skim off their limited, often borrowed, travel or pocket money.
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