EDITORIAL - Tier 1 in human trafficking

As human rights groups slam the Duterte administration for a year of calamitous rights violations, here’s a bit of good news: the Philippines has retained its top-tier ranking in the fight against human trafficking. This is according to the US State Department, in its 2017 Trafficking in Persons report.

The Philippines is the only member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations to be classified under Tier 1 of the report – a grouping of 36 countries that include Australia, Canada, France, Germany and the United States. Countries in Tier 1 are considered to be taking serious and sustained efforts to fight human trafficking.

This of course doesn’t mean that the problem has been licked or significantly reduced. Human trafficking remains a serious problem in this country that is one of the world’s largest labor exporters. Poverty also drives child labor and sexual exploitation within the country. Before being upgraded to Tier 1 last year, the Philippines languished in Tier 2 for five years, meaning the country did not fully comply with minimum standards for eliminating human trafficking, although there were significant efforts toward compliance.

The upgrading was due to the conviction and punishment of more human traffickers and a boost in efforts to prevent the trafficking of overseas Filipino workers. The US report, which evaluated 187 countries, noted that 272 suspected traffickers were arrested in the Philippines from April to December last year – up from 151 in the previous year. In 2016, 553 trafficking cases were investigated while 55 defendants were convicted.

Now the challenge for the country is to retain its Tier 1 status. Among the areas that can pull down the Philippines’ ranking are the slow progress of trafficking cases in courts as well as the weak investigation and prosecution of officials implicated in trafficking offenses. These are problems afflicting the Philippine judicial system in general, and not just in human trafficking cases.

Confronting human trafficking also entails dealing with the poverty that makes people vulnerable to labor exploitation and sexual abuse. Parents and guardians themselves are often the ones who traffic children. And there are many who are driven by dire need to subject themselves to exploitation and abuse. These problems must be addressed as aggressively as the country is pursuing human traffickers.