Legal News
According to the Council of Europe report some children trafficked into the UK were going missing from local authority care. (12 September 2012)
Date: 12/09/2012
The people were being brought into the UK for the purposes of sexual exploitation; there were indications to that effect the report by the Council said.
It raised concerns regarding the lack of secure and suitable accommodation for trafficked children who end up in local authorities care.
The Council of Europe's Greta (Group of Experts on Action Against Trafficking in Human Beings) says reports suggest a "significant" number of trafficked children in local authority care go missing and some end up rejoining those who exploited them in the first place.
Though there were hundreds of people who have been identified as victims of trafficking in the UK there were only 56 convictions for human trafficking in 2009 and 29 the following year.
The main countries from where the trafficked victims originated were China, Vietnam, Romania, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Albania, Nigeria, Uganda and India the report said,
Children were brought in with the propensity towards sexual exploitation, domestic servitude, benefit fraud, cannabis farming and forced begging and stealing.
Greta acknowledged the good work that was going on around in the UK but it found inconsistent approaches in different areas.
It focused on the significant gap in intelligence trafficking saying the levels of trust and co-operation between victim support services and law enforcement agencies needed improvement.
The Council of Europe on its website said that its aim was to develop common democratic principles throughout Europe based on the European Convention on Human Rights and other reference texts on the protection of individuals.
This wass its first assessment of human trafficking in the UK since the anti-trafficking convention came into force in the UK in April 2009.
Other actions it recommended for improving conditions for care of trafficked children were separating trafficking identification with decisions on immigration or asylum stressing that quick decisions on immigration status could prevent victims being recognized.
The need to support victims of human trafficking regardless of when the trafficking took place, guidance to prosecutors across UK to ensure trafficking was considered a serious violation of human rights and victims not penalised for illegal activities they commit under duress and assisted voluntary return programmes to be reviewed to check if it is apt for victims of trafficking.