Plans for single record of human trafficking victims

Plans to introduce a single record were discussed at a meeting on 17 September in the Ministry for the Family, Youth and Sport. According to the Director of the Department for Family and Gender Policy, Ella Lamakh, the register would be kept by departments of the Ministry in regional (oblast) and Kyiv and Sevastopol city administrations.

 According to the Ministry, there are presently eight functioning reintegration centres for trafficking victims (two in Odessa, one in the Volyn, Zhytomyr, Lviv, Chernivtsi, Kherson regions, and a medical rehabilitation centre in Kyiv).

The Ministry also reports that over the first 6 months of 2009 197 crimes falling under Article 149 of the Criminal Code (Human trafficking) were identified. 229 victims were returned to Ukraine these including 35 children, and 8 organized trafficking organizations were broken up.

The Ministry, with the support of the International Organization for Migration (IOM) runs help lines, one together with the Ministry of Internal Affairs. There is also another run by the international women’s human rights organization La Strada – Ukraine.

An important area in fighting human trafficking is heightening State control over go-between firms with licences to find people employment abroad. There is a need for nationwide and standardized statistics as well as studies making it possible to determine the link between preventive measures and the level of crime in this area.

The Ministry’s press service notes that most recruitment is for labour or sexual exploitation, with the destination countries most often the Russian Federation, Poland, Turkey, Lebanon and Israel.

From information at the Ministry’s website