Showing posts with label trafficking. Show all posts
Showing posts with label trafficking. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 27, 2019

Organ trafficking in Egypt--the Guardian

From the Guardian's series on Trafficking and exploitation :

Organ trafficking in Egypt
"Desperate to reach Europe, migrants from Africa are travelling to Egypt and selling body parts to pay for their passage"

"The trade appears to be flourishing in Egypt, bolstered by an EU-funded clampdown on refugees by security forces. There, the hostile environment created by the arbitrary detention of migrants, and the hike in smugglers’ fees, is creating a perfect opportunity for unscrupulous organ brokers who prey on those desperate to raise funds to cross the Mediterranean.

Monday, December 17, 2018

Australia's parliament reports on organ trafficking

Australia's parliament has published a report on organ trafficking in Australia. They didn't find much trafficking there, but recommend that data be more vigorously collected. They report that only one case of (attempted) paid organ donation has come to the attention of the authorities, but that it was successfully prevented, and the intended recipient died. The report ends with a case study of an anatomical exhibit using human cadavers.

Human Rights Sub-Committee, House of Representatives, Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade, November 2018, Canberra

(The above link is the the 178 page pdf version, and here's a link to the table of contents and each chapter separately).

"This report examines the global prevalence of human organ trafficking and the scope of Australian participation within this illicit trade.
...
"2.5...The commercial trade in human organs is near-universally prohibited. Despite these prohibitions and restrictions, the illicit commercial trade in human organs has been estimated by the research advisory organisation Global Financial Integrity to be worth between US$840 million and $1.7 billion globally each year.4 Up to 10 per cent of kidney transplants worldwide may now involve commercially traded organs.
...
"3.15 There has been only one reported case to date of alleged organ trafficking within Australian jurisdiction,
 Alleged case of organ trafficking in Australia
"In 2011, an Australian couple were alleged to have brought a woman from the Philippines to Australia, promising her monetary compensation and a working visa in exchange for a kidney donation.
The woman changed her mind upon arriving in Australia. Medical transplant integrity procedures – a pre-operative counselling session at a Sydney hospital –ensured that the situation was discovered before the removal of the organ.
The potential donor was identified as an alleged victim of organ trafficking, resulting in referral to the Australian Federal Police. Due to the death of the prospective recipient, and limitations of the legislation as then in force, the matter did not progress to prosecution."
...
"3.20 International studies have observed the tendency of patients born in a country where organ trafficking may occur, but living outside of that country, to be at a substantially higher risk of participation in transplant tourism.31 This would appear to be equally true in Australia, as Dr Campbell Fraser observed: "...less than five per cent of Australians who are waiting on organs are likely to even consider going overseas. ...most of the Australians who have purchased an organ overseas have ethnic family connections to the countries or regions where they buy their organs—Pakistani Australians tended to go to Pakistan, Egyptian Australians travel to Egypt, and so on."
...
"Mandatory reporting by medical practitioners
3.41 A large number of submissions and witnesses argued in favour of the establishment of a nationwide mandatory reporting scheme for commercial transplants. A Bill before the Parliament of New South Wales, Human Tissue Amendment (Trafficking in Human Organs) Bill 2016, introduced by Mr David Shoebridge MP, seeks to amend the Human Tissue Act 1983 (NSW). The amendment would, inter alia, require medical professionals to report to the NSW Secretary of Health any reasonable belief that a patient has received a commercial transplant or one sourced from a non-consenting donor.
...
"Case study on alleged human tissue trafficking 
‘Real Bodies’
6.1 The Real Bodies commercial anatomical exhibition, on display in Australia during the course of this inquiry, was brought to the attention of the  Sub-Committee by a number of witnesses and is illustrative of an apparent gap in the current legislation. The Real Bodies exhibition involves the commercial display of 20 plastinated human cadavers, and ‘over 200’ plastinated organs, embryos and foetuses.1
Allegations of the trafficking of organs and other human tissue
6.2Mr David Shoebridge MP of the New South Wales Parliament informed the Sub-Committee as to the nature of the exhibition:...
"[they] are real bodies ... they are displayed in quite grotesque circumstances—some of them literally sawn down the middle and presented as a human standing and divided in two so that you can look into the internal parts of them. There are pregnant women. There are multiple fetuses ... put on display for commercial gain ... it is a grossly exploitative process. The proprietors ... have been asked about the circumstances in which these bodies came into their possession, and they have been unable and unwilling to prove that any of the persons on display ever gave their consent."
**********

Here's an earlier post on repugnance to anatomical exhibits using cadavers:

Saturday, March 28, 2009, Markets for (viewing) bodies

Thursday, August 2, 2018

Politico summarizes the Backpage story

Here's an article for those who haven't been following this first amendment/prostitution/human trafficking story...

The Sex-Trafficking Case Testing the Limits of the First Amendment
How a couple of crusading journalists made a fortune selling adult escort ads and in the process became unlikely and widely reviled First Amendment advocates.
By PAUL DEMKO July 29, 2018

Many of the people quoted focus on the motivations of the protagonists (get rich, versus defend the First Amendment press freedoms...). I wonder what role if any those questions will play in the legal proceedings.


Here are my other posts about  Backpage and related matters.

Saturday, May 5, 2018

Illegal trade in wildlife--photographic art recording a black market

The WSJ has a story about a photographer who has created still-life photos from animal remains confiscated  by Canadian customs agents.

‘The illegal trade of wildlife is one of the great disgraces of humanity

"To create “Trafficked,” Fitzgerald holed up for days with the Wildlife Enforcement Branch of the Canadian government in a locked area containing cases of confiscated specimens from the illegal wildlife trade. She created all of the images using the laborious 19th century wet collodion process that involves exposing chemically treated photographic plates and then developing them in a darkroom. What resulted is a poetically compelling look at the evidence of human beings’ sometimes illegal, often abusive, relationship in wildlife trading."

Sunday, April 15, 2018

More Backpage (.com) news


From the Washington Post:
Backpage CEO Carl Ferrer pleads guilty in three states, agrees to testify against other website officials
"Carl Ferrer, the chief executive of Backpage.com whose name was conspicuously absent from an indictment of seven other Backpage officials unsealed Monday, has pleaded guilty in state courts in California and Texas and federal court in Arizona to charges of money laundering and conspiracy to facilitate prostitution. In addition, he agreed to testify against the men who co-founded Backpage with him, Michael Lacey and James Larkin, who remained in jail Thursday in Arizona on facilitating prostitution charges.
Backpage, in addition to hosting thinly veiled ads for prostitution since 2004, was accused of hosting child sex trafficking ads on its site and even assisting advertisers in wording their copy so they didn’t overtly declare that sex was for sale, federal investigators allege. In a remarkable three-paragraph admission in his federal plea agreement, Ferrer wrote that “I conspired with other Backpage principals … to find ways to knowingly facilitate the state-law prostitution crimes being committed by Backpage’s customers.
...
"Ferrer’s sudden capitulation launched a wild seven days for Backpage. A day after Ferrer’s first secret plea, the federal government arrested seven of Ferrer’s former colleagues, including Lacey and Larkin, and shut down Backpage’s websites in the U.S. and around the world. ...
"Then on Wednesday, President Trump signed into law “FOSTA,” the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act, a bill inspired by the stories of children being prostituted on Backpage..."
**********************
And here's a story from Quartz that follows the work of economists researching the (not all bad) effects of internet marketplaces for prostitution.

Wednesday, April 11, 2018

Backpage.com, seized by the FBI and indicted by the Department of Justice

The latest development in the legal battle of Backpage.com, an online marketplace for sex and, apparently, trafficking in women and children, has resulted in the closing of the site.

On April 6 2018 the content of the site was replaced with a notice beginning “backpage.com and affiliated websites have been seized as part of an enforcement action by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the U.S. Postal Service Inspection Service, and the Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation Division, with analytical assistance from the Joint Regional Intelligence Center.” 
The accompanying indictment (https://www.justice.gov/file/1050276/download )suggests that the proprietors of Backpage.com may have helped write the site’s content, and thus not be protected by the 1996 Communications Decency Act. 

In a parallel development, in March (of 2018) the Senate passed (by a vote of 97 to 2) and forwarded to the President for signature the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act of 2017, as previously passed by the House of Representatives. It amends the Communications Act of 1934, “to  clarify  that  section  230  of  such  Act  does  not  prohibit  the  enforcement  against providers and users of interactive computer services of Federal and State criminal and civil law relating to sexual exploitation of  children  or  sex  trafficking…” https://www.congress.gov/115/crpt/hrpt572/CRPT-115hrpt572-pt1.pdf .  

Thursday, April 5, 2018

Cursing sex traffickers in Nigeria

In some religious traditions, curses are performative, i.e. performing a curse is thought to have consequences for those cursed.  In Nigeria, a traditional leader is applying this to public policy.

The NY Times has the story:
A Voodoo Curse on Human Traffickers

"On March 9, Oba Ewuare II, the traditional ruler of the kingdom of Benin, in southern Nigeria, put a voodoo curse on anyone who abets illegal migration within his domain. At the same time, he revoked the curses that leave victims of trafficking afraid that their relatives will die if they go to the police or fail to pay off their debt.

"Before being smuggled into Europe, women and girls in the area, which falls in present-day Edo State, are made to sign a contract with the traffickers who finance their journey, promising to pay them thousands of dollars. The agreement is sealed with a voodoo, or juju, ritual, conducted by a spiritual priest, known here as a native doctor.
...
"Edo is not one of Nigeria’s poorest states. But in the early 1980s women there started traveling to Italy to trade in gold and beads, and “saw a thriving market in prostitution,” said Kokunre Agbontaen-Eghafona, a professor at the University of Benin and a researcher for the International Organization for Migration. She believes this “founders factor” is the main reason Edo has become such a center of human trafficking."