[Joint House and Senate Hearing, 112 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
HUMAN TRAFFICKING AND TRANSNATIONAL
ORGANIZED CRIME: ASSESSING TRENDS
AND COMBAT STRATEGIES
=======================================================================
HEARING
before the
COMMISSION ON SECURITY AND COOPERATION IN EUROPE
ONE HUNDRED TWELFTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
NOVEMBER 3, 2011
__________
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COMMISSION ON SECURITY AND COOPERATION IN EUROPE
LEGISLATIVE BRANCH COMMISSIONERS
HOUSE SENATE
CHRISTOPHER H. SMITH, New Jersey, BENJAMIN L. CARDIN, Maryland,
Chairman Co-Chairman
JOSEPH R. PITTS, Pennsylvania SHELDON WHITEHOUSE, Rhode Island
ROBERT B. ADERHOLT, Alabama TOM UDALL, New Mexico
PHIL GINGREY, Georgia JEANNE SHAHEEN, New Hampshire
MICHAEL C. BURGESS, Texas RICHARD BLUMENTHAL, Connecticut
ALCEE L. HASTINGS, Florida ROBERT F. WICKER, Mississippi
LOUISE McINTOSH SLAUGHTER, SAXBY CHAMBLISS, Georgia
New York MARCO RUBIO, Florida
MIKE McINTYRE, North Carolina KELLY AYOTTE, New Hampshire
STEVE COHEN, Tennessee
EXECUTIVE BRANCH COMMISSIONERS
MICHAEL H. POSNER, Department of State
MICHAEL C. CAMUNNEZ, Department of Commerce
ALEXANDER VERSHBOW, Department of Defense
(ii)
HUMAN TRAFFICKING AND TRANSNATIONAL
ORGANIZED CRIME: ASSESSING TRENDS
AND COMBAT STRATEGIES
----------
November 3, 2011
COMMISSIONERS
Page
Hon. Christopher H. Smith, Chairman, Commission on Security and
Cooperation in Europe.......................................... 1
Hon. Marco Rubio, Commissioner, Commission on Security and
Cooperation in Europe.......................................... 3
Hon. Steve Cohen, Commissioner, Commission on Security and
Cooperation in Europe.......................................... 25
WITNESSES
Greg Andres, Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal
Division, U.S. Department of Justice........................... 3
Piero Bonadeo, Deputy Representative to the United Nations Office
on Drugs and Crime, New York................................... 9
Martina Vandenberg, Pro Bono Counsel, The Freedom Network USA.... 14
APPENDICES
Prepared statement of Hon. Christopher H. Smith.................. 28
Prepared statement of Hon. Benjamin L. Cardin.................... 30
Prepared statement of Marco Rubio................................ 31
Prepared statement of Greg Andres................................ 32
Prepared statement of Piero Bonadeo.............................. 39
Prepared statement of Martina Vandenberg......................... 42
(iii)
HUMAN TRAFFICKING AND TRANSNATIONAL
ORGANIZED CRIME: ASSESSING TRENDS
AND COMBAT STRATEGIES
----------
November 3, 2011
Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe
Washington, DC
The hearing was held at 10 a.m. in room B-318, Rayburn
House Office Building, Washington, DC, Hon. Marco Rubio,
Commissioner, Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe,
presiding.
Commissioners present: Hon. Christopher H. Smith, Chairman,
Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe; Hon. Marco
Rubio, Commissioner, Commission on Security and Cooperation in
Europe; and Hon. Steve Cohen, Commissioner, Commission on
Security and Cooperation in Europe.
Witnesses present: Greg Andres, Deputy Assistant Attorney
General for the Criminal Division, U.S. Department of Justice;
Piero Bonadeo, Deputy Representative to the United Nations
Office on Drugs and Crime, New York; and Martina Vandenberg,
Pro Bono Counsel, The Freedom Network.
HON. CHRISTOPHER H. SMITH, CHAIRMAN, COMMISSION ON SECURITY AND
COOPERATION IN EUROPE
The Commission will come to order, and good morning to
everybody. Thank you for being here for this hearing on the
Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe--human
trafficking and transnational organized crime, assessing trends
and combat strategies. This morning we'll be talking about
human trafficking, as we have done so often in the past on this
Commission. In 1998, some of you may know, I introduced the
Trafficking Victims Protection Act, and not long after that
chaired this Commission's first hearing on human trafficking.
At that time, the idea that human trafficking even existed
was--and was widespread--was met with a wall of skepticism and
opposition. People, whether in government or not, thought the
bold new strategy of the TVPA, although we had a different name
for it then--we finally added that name near the end of the
process--but they thought that sheltering, asylum and other
protections for victims, long jail sentence and asset
confiscation for the traffickers, and tough sanctions for
governments that fail to meet minimum standards, were merely a
solution in search of a problem.
Today, few would deny that the scourge of human
trafficking, though often hidden, is in fact very widespread.
Back in the 1990s, the term ``trafficking'' was applied almost
exclusively to illicit drugs or weapons. Reports of vulnerable
persons, especially woman and children, being reduced to
objects for sale were met with surprise, incredulity or
indifference. It took two years to educate people, especially
in the U.S. House and Senate, to muster the votes for passage
of the legislation.
Today as we explore the links between transnational
organized crime and trafficking, I'd like to start by pointing
out that there is a new frontier in the fight against human
trafficking. Years ago human traffickers were not highly
organized and were not typically connected to gangs. They were
involved in other kinds of organized crime. This is less and
less true today, and we need to consider how methods of
fighting human trafficking need to adapt. We know that human
trafficking, or modern-day slavery, is the third-most lucrative
criminal activity in the world. According to the International
Labor Organization, ILO, human traffickers made profits in
excess of $31 billion a year. And so it is not surprising that
more and more organized criminal groups are engaging in modern-
day slavery. And, of course, while drug and arms traffickers
have a commodity that can be sold only once, human traffickers
can purchase a slave and continually exploit that individual
until he makes his money back and then some. And obviously, it
is very, very lucrative.
This is a complex subject. It is marked by the growing
ingenuity of organized criminal groups, the difficulty of
knowing what or who passes over increasingly porous borders,
and the gangs' use of modern technologies. All this has
obscured the activities of many syndicates, and made learning
about fighting their activities very difficult. Yet, it is not
impossible and simply has to be done, because so many
vulnerable people--so many lives are at stake.
I'd like to conclude with one very important point: the
premise that must shape how we approach the fight against
transnational organized crime as it diversifies its operations
into human trafficking. Human beings are more important than
drugs and guns, of course. Our allocation of effort and
resources which investigate, and our prosecutorial strategies,
need to reflect this. This needs to be the highest possible
priority.
Today we are joined by a panel of experts on transnational
organized crime and human trafficking who will shed light on
current patterns and countermeasures. Their combined expertise
should paint a clear picture of organized crime's involvement
in human trafficking, and what can be done to help to stop it.
With us today is Mr. Greg Andres, the current deputy
assistant attorney general in the crime division, where he
supervises the organized crime section at the Department of
Justice. Mr. Andres comes to us with over a decade of
experience working on organized crime issues. We will then be
joined by Mr. Piero Bonadeo, deputy representative for the U.N.
Office on Drugs and Crime in New York. Mr. Bonadeo's testimony
will bring the UNODC's years of experience in combating
transnational organized crime.
And finally, we will have Ms. Martina Vandenberg, a
seasoned attorney with years of experience combating
trafficking in persons as well as in broader human rights
context of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo and the Russian
Federation and Uzbekistan--all of which have significant human
trafficking histories and problems and are of great interest to
our Commission. Mr. Greg Andres, I would like to now turn this
over to you for your comments.
GREG ANDRES, DEPUTY ASSISTANT ATTORNEY GENERAL FOR THE CRIMINAL
DIVISION, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE
Mr. Andres. Thank you. Thank you, Chairman Smith. Thank you
for inviting me to speak with you this morning about the threat
posed by human trafficking and transnational organized crime,
the efforts of the Department of Justice is taking to address
those threats, and the steps that Congress can take that will
assist us in those efforts.
The fight against transnational organized crime is one of
the highest enforcement priorities of the Department of
Justice. Together with the United States Attorneys' Office and
our many partners in law enforcement, the Criminal Division
investigates and prosecutes cases involving transnational
organized crime all over the country, indeed, all over the
world. The threats posed by these groups are significant and
growing.
Mr. Smith. Mr. Andres, if you could just suspend for one--
and I apologize for the rudeness of the intervention--but
would--there's a markup in the Foreign Affairs Committee that I
must be at--two bills are going to be voted on right now.
Thankfully, Senator Mark Rubio is here and will take the chair.
And when you conclude this statement, he will give his
statement. And I do thank you for your understanding.
HON. MARCO RUBIO, COMMISSIONER, COMMISSION ON SECURITY AND
COOPERATION IN EUROPE
Mr. Rubio. Thank you, Chairman. Welcome. I don't get to
chair a lot of things around here, so--people continue. Thank
you.
Mr. Andres. Good morning, Commissioner Rubio.
In recognition of the issues with respect to transnational
organized crime, in July the administration released its
strategy to combat transnational organized crime, which sets
forth a whole-of-government response to the threat. At the
Department of Justice, we are committed to the fight against
transnational organized crime and human trafficking, and we
have enjoyed certain successes to date as to both.
In the area of human trafficking, the department last month
secured the racketeering convictions of two brothers who ran a
human trafficking scheme. That scheme involved smuggling young
Ukrainian immigrants into the United States and forcing them to
work without pay through threats and assault, sexual abuse and
debt-bondage. Roughly six months earlier, in May of this year
in a separate case, a Uzbek national was sentenced to 12 years
in prison after he pled guilty to racketeering conspiracy,
which charged a scheme to recruit and exploit dozens of workers
from Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, the Philippines and
elsewhere, and force those individuals to work in hospitality
jobs in at least 14 states through threats of deportation and
financial penalties.
Many of our human trafficking cases involve loosely
affiliated networks of individuals engaged in the exploitation
of human trafficking victims. These criminals tend to utilize
smuggling pipelines and money-laundering conduits operated by
other criminal groups, and whose services the traffickers
procure for their own purposes. On occasion, human traffickers
themselves belong to a larger organized crime group or
enterprise. In some cases, criminals may operate
transnationally, recruiting victims overseas with false
promises--good jobs in the United States--and threatening
retaliation against their overseas families if they try to
escape once they realize their true predicament.
To the extent that these networks or groups are committing
portions of their crimes abroad, our investigations and
prosecutions of these organizations and crimes must overcome
significant obstacles. At a minimum, pursuing an investigation
abroad is often time-consuming and delays can be significant.
These delays can undermine our investigations. Tracking down
criminals abroad often requires the cooperation of foreign law
enforcement agencies.
Furthermore, even if we locate our targets, many of the
investigative tools for gathering evidence are not available in
the international context. In many countries we cannot employ
Title III-type wiretaps against perpetrators, or secure routine
surveillance. Nor can we, in most cases, send an undercover
agent to gather incriminating statements. Sometimes the
country's law enforcement agencies may not have the level of
training or the technology to implement the necessary
investigative steps, even if they were authorized to do so.
Arresting lower-level members of the organization and
persuading them to cooperate against higher-level bosses is
also extremely difficult, and may require the approval and
cooperation of foreign authorities. Finally, many countries
have laws which ban the extradition of their own citizens to
foreign countries for prosecution. There are important steps
that we can take to better address extraterritorial threats and
the increasing global reach of transnational criminal
organizations.
The Department of Justice, together with our partners, have
developed a package of legislative proposals to ensure that
federal laws keep us up with the rapid evolution of organized
criminal activity.
We need to change our existing money laundering, asset
forfeiture, narcotics and racketeering laws. Additional
proposals recognize that an increasingly global law enforcement
environment, witness security and the protection of foreign
witnesses must also be available. This last provision may be of
particular help in situations where a foreign government is
helping us to prosecute an international human trafficking
ring, but is unable to protect its witnesses.
I'm happy to discuss these proposals and to answer any
questions. Thank you very much.
Mr. Rubio. Thank you. Thank you very much. And I'll couch
my question in the form of the opening statement.
First--to thank you for being here, and all those who are
here to testify and be a part of this hearing on this important
issue. I'm grateful to the chairman and the co-chairman for
allowing us to hold these hearings and--on what I think is a
shocking issue that I was not fully aware of before I got
here--although I'd heard about it. And I think many Americans
are unaware of the extent to which this issue impacts the
country in the world that--we tend to think of slavery as
something that happened 150 years ago or 200 years ago or in
other places. But we don't realize that even here, today, in
the United States, there are people that are being held against
their will.
Obviously, we will talk a little bit about sexual
exploitation, but there's also all kinds of other elements to
this including forced labor and domestic servitude. And we've
seen those stories and the kind of the parameters that are
pretty broad in terms of what qualifies as human slavery that
exist to this day. I appreciate the work that you guys do on
these issues. This is a cutting-edge issue that I think we have
an opportunity to create awareness on, because--and I think in
our questions we'll get to some of that. I think awareness of
the existence of this will help us identify domestic victims.
And I think internationally, our country has taken the lead
in terms of the role we've played in classifying countries to
compliance, and the tier system has taken the lead in terms of
calling attention to this human rights issue. And one of the
things that always adds to our nation is when we are strong
spokespersons on behalf of human rights all over the world. And
I can think of no issue that has a higher priority--or should
have a higher priority than the issue of trafficking persons
and human slavery.
So with that, let me--a couple questions that I have. I
think the first is--you talked a little bit about the--
obviously the Department of Justice has a long history of
prosecuting organized crime cases. This human trafficking
element is a relatively new component of how we are approaching
these organized crime organizations. How has that forced you
to--and I think you talked about it a little bit in your
statement--but how has that forced you to alter how you
strategize with regard to interacting with these groups? What
new dynamics does it present from the traditional activities
that organized crime has largely been linked to--in trafficking
in drugs, et cetera.
And second of all, is the law caught up with the realities
of what it takes to prosecute, whether it's how hard it is to
get witnesses or reliable information, those sorts of things? I
mean, I guess my--the basic question I have is: This is kind of
a new problem that you're facing as you confront these
organized crime operations. And organized crime itself has
changed as well. Are our laws up to date with the 21st-century
realities of prosecuting organized crime--in particular when it
comes to the trafficking of people?
Mr. Andres. Thank you, Commissioner Rubio. One thing that's
certainly clear about organized crime--and organized crime,
even traditional Cosa Nostra domestic organized crime
organizations have traditionally evolved, rather significantly,
over the last decades. The abiding principle of organized crime
groups is they exist for the purpose of making money--period.
And the fact that human trafficking is an opportunity to
generate additional revenues certainly makes it alluring to
organized crime groups, both here in the United States and
internationally. So even as we've seen when we've prosecuted
domestically the mob, we've seen they've changed from tactics
like murder and extortion to now being involved in white-collar
crimes or Wall Street. So we're certainly used to the changing
nature of organized crime, and the fact that it adapts as we
adapt our law enforcement strategies.
There is an international component here. It's not the only
component, but there is an international component here. And
our laws do need to be updated to address those international
concerns. When you talk about investigating cases
internationally, you have to start with cooperation by foreign
governments. That's essential. In some of these countries where
there is trafficking and organized crime influence, we don't
always have the cooperation of those governments. There's
corruption in many of those places, and so there are
difficulties with respect to that issue.
On the legislative front, and briefly, we need to update
our racketeering laws so that international organized crime
groups that are operating abroad and don't have as many
physical touches to the United States, but that are affecting
the United States--the organizations but also their money and
their use of the United States financial system to launder
their money. We need to update our witness protection
provisions, which allow us to secure witnesses who may be
involved in prosecutions abroad and that are helping foreign
governments convict and prosecute these enterprises abroad. So
we do need to update our laws.
Let me just finish by saying, we have had successes and we
have been concentrating on this issue. I think the
administration's strategy on transnational organized crime is
another effort to highlight the problem of human trafficking.
But you should be confident that the prosecutors in the
Department of Justice, primarily in the Civil Rights Division,
have taken an active role in prosecuting these cases.
And if I could just give you one example as it relates to
Mexico. Since 2009, our prosecutors have been working--along
with the agents in the FBI and ICE--have been working
collaboratively with Mexican law enforcement officials on
arrests, convictions both here in the United States and Mexico.
We've helped to rescue victims as part of this bilateral
cooperation; reunify U.S. victims with their families,
returning them from Mexico.
We've had success with prosecutions here in the United
States, both in Atlanta--in the United States versus Ruggiero--
and also in Miami in United States versus Cortez-Castro. So we
do have working relationships with foreign governments. That is
a vital part of this strategy because so much of the evidence,
as it related to international organized crime, exists abroad.
Mr. Rubio. In terms of the witnesses, the victims, is the
current structure and nature of our immigration system make it
easier for these crimes to happen? In essence how is the
existing immigration structure, complicated visa process, what
have you, the existing lack thereof or existence of a for lack
of a better term the guest-worker program.
It's not really a guest-worker program but that's how it
really functions as. The way our system, our visa program, is
currently structured today, does it make it harder to prosecute
these cases? And more importantly, have the traffickers
actually figured out how to use the system to their benefit?
Mr. Andres. I think the latter is important here, that is,
traffickers have used that to exploit the system and to lure
people, basically, here to the United States. So through use of
the Internet or other means to publicize this, those who are
interested in committing the crime of human trafficking--
Mr. Rubio. Explain to me briefly how they use the system as
it's currently structured today. How do they use the current
visa system to get people in the country and then kind of trap
them here, right?
Mr. Andres. Sure, they lure them here with--under the guise
of getting a guest-worker visa or some other type visa that
they may apply for. And once they get here, they then exploit
those individuals. Obviously, a lot of the human trafficking
problem preys on the vulnerability of people here in the United
States, whether it's a vulnerability because they're not from
the United States--they don't have families and relatives here.
They don't know the system; they don't know the laws.
So traffickers are able to lure them here to the United
States, and then basically enslave them to do a variety of
different things, whether it's involved in the sex trade or
it's involved as laborers. They basically lure them here and
then entrap them once they have them here and are able to
control their lives.
Mr. Rubio. Their visas are linked to a specific employer,
right? Basically that--whoever it is they brought them in to
work for?
Mr. Andres. I believe that's true. But I don't know that
specifically. But we certainly could look into that, Senator,
and get back to you.
Mr. Rubio. Now, in terms of once you find a victim, or a
witness, or both, how hard is it to get them to cooperate if--
for example depending on their status in the country, their
fear of family abroad, and what kind of measures have you
looked at? Because one of the things I've read about is once
you identify a victim, the victim is probably very insecure
about their own status, their own ability--kind of where they
stand on this whole thing and where it's going to lead them.
What's your sense of how hard has it been to get victims to
become witnesses, how--and to become reliable witnesses and
to--cooperative ones as a result of two things--number one is
their status or their fear and number two is maybe their family
abroad?
Mr. Andres. So, let me say two things: One distinction with
respect to dealing with victims in human trafficking cases
are--they certainly have different status; that is, having gone
through the ordeal of being a victim in those cases, there are
additional challenges that we have to deal with. I think our
law enforcement partners in the FBI and ICE and other agencies
have developed an expertise in dealing with those victims.
As for cooperating, again, that's not new to us. That's not
a new struggle for people who've been involved in prosecuting
organized crime cases. Obviously when we've done it
domestically, whether it's an MS-13 gang or the Gambino family,
there are always individuals who are afraid of retaliation by
those organized crime groups. That's why things like the
witness protection program have been a vital part of our fight
against organized crime, and there is a new proposal that will
extend that internationally. So we can use some of the tools
that we already have and have been using to fight organized
crime in the context of human trafficking, to provide a safe
and secure location for people so that they can have the
confidence to go into court and testify against those involved
in these crimes.
Mr. Rubio. I think my last question is, with regards to the
groups that are actually conducting this, obviously we--the
transnational--the big groups with the brand names, are the
ones we know a lot about. But there's some emerging evidence of
some smaller scale groups, for lack of a better term mom-and-
pop, family-run operations that are a handful of family--I
mean, I've read anecdotally; maybe I'm wrong--but I've read
anecdotally there's a number of smaller scale operations where
it's really three or four people.
How--do they present a different challenge in prosecuting
and identifying, number one? And number two, is there a
specific kind of trafficking that they're more involved in
than, say, the bigger transnational groups?
Mr. Andres. There is no question that there is a change in
organized crime both domestically and internationally, that
there are emerging groups, that are smaller groups. They don't
necessarily have household names.
Luckily under our racketeering laws, you don't have to have
a name or be a recognized group to be charged under
racketeering because we can charge you with being an
association in fact. So, if there are a group of individuals,
even if it's a family organization or a family group, we can
charge them together as an enterprise. Some of the legislative
proposals that we have add state law crimes as slavery and
other related human trafficking offenses as RICO predicates. So
we're able to attack them with our racketeering laws.
So the updates in the law will address that and, again, I'm
not sure that the challenge--there are some different
challenges, but to the extent that we can use our racketeering
laws, that's helpful and, again, we have had some success in
doing that. Our civil rights prosecutors have been working with
our organized crime prosecutors to bring RICO cases. There was
recently a series of brothers who were charged in Philadelphia
with importing victims, and we were able to charge what was
basically a family-run operation with importing victims for the
purposes of human trafficking.
So, again, we do need to update our laws, but some of the
past strategies that we've used for organized crime, we're able
to adapt those, together with the new legislation, we believe
we'll be able to be successful in prosecuting these groups.
Mr. Rubio. Thank you very much for your time today and your
testimony. We appreciate it. Thank you.
Mr. Andres. Thank you.
Mr. Rubio. I guess our next witness is a Mr. Piero Bonadeo.
How are you? Give you a few minutes to set up. Thank you
for coming today.
PIERO BONADEO, DEPUTY REPRESENTATIVE TO THE UNITED NATIONS
OFFICE ON DRUGS AND CRIME, NEW YORK
Mr. Bonadeo. Thank you. Thank you for inviting the UNODC
and for allowing us to bring some international perspective to
this important discussion.
On behalf of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime,
a sincere thanks to the Commission on Security and Cooperation
in Europe for inviting me to speak. The cooperation spirit of
the Commission as well as the one of the Organization for
Security and Cooperation in Europe has often supported the
United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and the United Nations
Global Initiative to Fight Human Trafficking.
Human trafficking is a truly global phenomenon and a crime
which affects nearly every part of the world, whether as a
source, transit or destination country. According to the United
Nations Office on Drugs and Crime Human Trafficking Report,
released in 2009, victims from at least 127 countries have been
identified, and this is estimated that the more than 2.4
million people are being exploited by criminals at any given
time.
More than a decade after the adoption of the protocol to
prevent, suppress and punish trafficking in persons, especially
women and children, supplementing the United Nations Convention
Against Transnational Organized Crime, the Palermo Convention,
the largest majority of countries have criminalized most forms
of human trafficking in their legislation. Nevertheless, the
use of such laws to prosecute and convict traffickers remains
limited. In 2009 ``Global Report on Trafficking Persons,'' for
instance, two out of every five countries covered in the report
had never recorded a single conviction for human trafficking
offenses.
The demand of trafficking victims, especially those related
to sexual exploitation, remains high, particularly in Europe.
According to the United Nation Office on Drugs and Crime
Organized Crime Threat Assessment, the majority of the victims
detected in Europe come from the Balkans and the former Soviet
Union, including countries such as Romania, Bulgaria, Ukraine,
the Russian Federation and the Republic of Moldova. With regard
to victims originating in South America, mostly from Brazil,
they are being sent to destinations such as Spain, Italy,
Portugal, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, and
Switzerland. African victims are sourced mainly in West Africa
although North African victims seems to be increasing. Finally,
Asian victims are mainly originating in Thailand; mostly
recently Chinese, Vietnamese and Cambodian victims are also
increasing.
Traffickers remain using deception and coercion as the main
instrument to recruit victims. As recent trend, women seem
notably only involved in recruiting other women, but also
playing the role of guardians in the countries of destination
of victims. Another crime is that, in the case of Europe, the
perpetrators are frequently not nationals of the country where
they operate, but often national of the same countries as their
victims.
Distinguished Commissioner, cooperation is fundamental to
combat the exploitation of women, children and men by human
traffickers. With the outcome of our own efforts to gather
information from member states, trafficking in persons for
forced labor is the second most reported form of exploitation.
But we share with all of you a concern that this form of
trafficking is less frequently detected and reported than
trafficking in persons for sexual exploitation. Labor traffic
just until recently was started to be taken into consideration
by the world community. Prosecution and criminalization of this
particular type of trafficking also needs to be set in
practice.
UNODC is helping to shine a powerful light on this crime.
Working with others, in particular the Organization for
Security and Cooperation in Europe, we are developing clear
strategies to meet government and civil society concerns. In
doing so, UNODC brings a unique criminal justice approach. As
the guardian of the United Nations Convention against
Transnational Organized Crime, we have ready-made legal
framework for international cooperation and the prevention of
human trafficking. Thanks to the convention, police no longer
have to stop at frontiers while criminals cross them
frequently.
We should also not forget how human trafficking is related
to instability. When social and political upheaval exists, as
in North Africa at present, our work is even more important in
such turbulent and disordered regions.
Trafficking in human beings is one of the most lucrative
forms of organized crime, estimated to generate 32 billion U.S.
dollars in gross proceeds each year. Criminal assets arising
from this grave violation of human rights and fundamental
freedoms may be invested in legitimate and criminal activities,
challenging economic security and fueling corruption and
undermining the rule of law.
In a bid to answer these questions, UNODC has developed a
database of human trafficking case law to provide immediate
public access to officially documented instances of this crime.
The database contains details of the nationalities of victims
and perpetrators, trafficking routes, verdicts and other
information related to prosecuted cases around the world. As
such, it provides not only statistics on the number of
prosecutions and convictions, but also the real-life stories of
trafficked persons as documented in the courts.
A little over a year ago the General Assembly passed by
consensus the United Nations Global Plan of Action to Combat
Trafficking in Persons; promoted universal ratification of the
United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime
and the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in
Persons, Especially Women and Children, as well as other
relevant international instruments that address trafficking in
persons and reinforce the implementation of existing
instruments against trafficking in persons and building on the
relevant subregional, regional and cross-regional mechanisms
and initiatives.
An important operationalization of the global plan of
action and another mechanism promoting the right to an
effective remedy for victims of trafficking is the United
Nations Voluntary Trust Fund for Victims of Trafficking in
Persons, Especially Women and Children, launched last November
in New York. The fund, managed by UNODC, provides humanitarian,
legal and financial aid to victims of trafficking in persons
through established channels of assistance, such as
governments, nongovernmental organizations and international
organizations.
I would like to conclude the statement by thanking the U.S.
government in supporting not only the actions of the United
Nations Office of Drugs and Crime, but the international
community at large. We have an excellent cooperation with the
office of the Ambassador Louis C. de Baca, especially on human
trafficking.
Thank you.
Mr. Rubio. Thank you for your testimony, and I actually
read it before today as well.
Mr. Bonadeo. OK.
Mr. Rubio. Thanks for the audience and for repeating it to
me.
A few quick questions just on the role of the United
States: How big a role does the United States play with the
office, in particular with your operation? In terms of the
funding and personnel and et cetera, how would you characterize
the U.S.'s role today, and how important is it?
Mr. Bonadeo. Well, in general, the U.S. government is one
of the largest contributors to UNODC. Of course, it's
contributing to support and implement projects that are
addressing transnational organized crime in general; so I
cannot tell you now how much of this money is going to projects
related to human trafficking.
Of course, the fact that there is a trust fund now. It's
managed by UNODC, but is a U.N. trust fund that is basically
supporting nations--mainly implemented by nongovernmental
organizations around the world as a way of increasing the U.S.
support to this kind of problem at multilateral level. So it's
a relevant contribution, as I said, and is addressing
transnational organized crime in general.
Mr. Rubio. Now, when these organizations look to recruit,
for lack of a better term, victims, what are the conditions--
what are the underlying conditions that create fertile ground
for that? What are the markers of a society that tell you that
they're vulnerable to this sort of activity?
Mr. Bonadeo. Well, in the U.N.--United Nations Global Plan
of Action Against Human Trafficking [sic], there are somehow
recognition of the basic elements that are somehow fostering
human trafficking and those are, of course, underdevelopment,
poverty. And most recently we have been seeing that in
countries that are also affected by instability due to--
political instability due to transnational organized-crime type
of activities, in particular drug trafficking, also human
trafficking is somehow increasing.
I'm thinking about West Africa, for instance, as a region
that is under attack by drug traffickers, and we have been
seeing how there is an increase of smuggling of migrants and
human trafficking coming from that region. So, to the
traditional issues of underdevelopment and poverty, there is
this new element of instability that organized crime
organization are also exploiting for increasing their human
trafficking activity.
Mr. Rubio. So, when we look at source countries or source
areas for victims, what you're basically looking at is a
combination of the society where people don't see economic
opportunities, deep poverty and despair, combined with a
government that's either unwilling or unable to stop these
predators from coming in and taking advantage of that?
Mr. Bonadeo. Correct.
Mr. Rubio. And then--so on that question of governments
that are unwilling or unable to take care of it, how many of
them--and you can identify them if you want to--but how big a
problem do we have of nations that don't want to do anything
about this because the transnational entities have corrupted
the government and have basically allowed them to--or gotten
them to look the other way?
Mr. Bonadeo. Well, as I said, the protocol to the Palermo
Convention is the most powerful tool that the international
community has available for pushing those governments that are
not responsive or are not doing enough to do something. A
hundred and forty-six countries are parties to the protocol,
but of course, being party doesn't mean that the protocol is
fully implemented and the countries that are somehow trying to
cooperate on this issue could also take advantage of the
protocol itself. For instance, mutual legal assistance is one
of the elements included in the protocol and is always helping
in cooperation--making it possible--cooperation amongst
countries on criminal justice aspect of human trafficking.
Mr. Rubio. What I'm trying to figure out----
Mr. Bonadeo. Yeah.
Mr. Rubio. ----and you, because of your global view on
this, is how many--obviously I think we know that there are
countries that would like--we have that tier system that our
State Department uses--I think there are countries that would
want to improve if they had the resources to do it, and
obviously there are mechanisms in place to help them. Is there
any evidence of a significant number of either national
governments or local governments in these places that are in
essence cooperating with the traffickers and with these
organizations because they've been corrupted, because they're
being paid off, because of some mutually beneficial
arrangement? I mean, is that a significant part of the problem?
Mr. Bonadeo. Is there--well, we are going to release a new
human trafficking report in 2012. The office is precisely
working on this--on this study, so all those elements will be
highlighted in the new study, and we are also working on the
new UNODC global threat assessment, which is trying to
highlight how organized crime in all its forms are somehow
affecting the stability of countries.
Of course, there is a link between instability, corruption
and the inability of countries and governments to properly
address this issue. Corruption is not only fueling human
trafficking and activities of the international organized crime
organizations; it is also fueling instability and, as I said,
I'm always referring to West Africa because it's the most
evident example of how corruption--and generated by
transnational organized crime--is really basically failing
governments of the countries.
Mr. Rubio. And this is probably another question for some
other advocates as well, but what I would ask is, are there any
jurisdictions in the world--cities or countries--that are
basically known--that we know are tolerating this or maybe even
encouraging it? In essence, they're sending out the message
that this is the place to come to find victims? Or this is the
place to come to participate in these acts--and as particularly
when it comes to sexual exploitation? Are there any countries
in the world who are generally regarded as places where this is
tolerated and maybe even encouraged as either a source or as a
destination?
Mr. Bonadeo. There are, but I--
Mr. Rubio. --find them? Like who would--and maybe you don't
want to tell me, but how do I----
Mr. Bonadeo. Maybe if you re-read the report of the U.S.
government on this issue, you can find some--
Mr. Rubio. OK.
Mr. Bonadeo. But, as the U.N., we are not really pointing
the finger at over one country or another; we are looking more
at the regional level--this phenomenon from the regional point
of view and the route of traffickers. So there are.
Mr. Rubio. The last question is, I would imagine that
awareness is a big--if most people knew that what they were
being recruited in--not most people, but if anyone knew that
they were being recruited into slavery via forced labor, sexual
exploitation, they wouldn't go. So obviously, they're being
deceived.
In addition, as a society, if everyone knew the signs of
this, people would understand it, would recognize it and call
it out. And I think that's true for some governments, that if
they had the ability to recognize this stuff or were sensitive
to it--a lot of this is just an issue of awareness. It's hard
to believe that this is happening. It's hard for people to
accept that.
Well, how much of a challenge is that awareness aspect of
it around the world? Clearly, in a society like the one that
you live in or I live in with massive number of communications
operations, news 24 hours, multiple newspapers, more news than
you ever want or need, it's one way to create awareness for
these issues, but I would imagine, especially in many of these
source countries, the fact that this even exists is hard to
disseminate and hard to explain to people. I mean, is that an
accurate assessment? And what strategies are there in place to
overcome that?
Mr. Bonadeo. At multilateral level? Well, first of all,
awareness is essential. And raising visibility around this
issue is even more important, especially in countries of
source. At multilateral level, we are running a global campaign
called the Blue Heart Campaign, which is somehow raising
visibility and also bringing to the potential victims what are
their rights and how they can somehow avoid a certain situation
or detect in advance being in certain situation that are then
leading them to be victims of human trafficking.
So in any of the UNODC projects that are addressing the
human trafficking around the world, there is also a component
on awareness, especially in the country of Africa and
especially for projects implemented in Southeast Asia. So it's
there, the message sometimes is well received; sometimes it's
not received. So there is a huge, huge effort that this--should
still be done on this issue.
Mr. Rubio. Thank you very much for your work and for your
testimony.
Mr. Bonadeo. Thank you.
Mr. Rubio. We appreciate it. Thank you.
Mr. Bonadeo. Thank you so much. Thank you so much.
Mr. Rubio. And I think our last witness today is Ms.
Martina Vandenberg, who is the counsel for Freedom Network USA.
MARTINA VANDENBERG, PRO BONO COUNSEL, THE FREEDOM NETWORK USA
Ms. Vandenberg. Thank you very much, Senator Rubio. It's an
honor to appear before you today. I would like to start by
thanking you for your leadership in this area in human
trafficking, particularly your work on the Trafficking Victims
Protection Reauthorization Act. It's an honor to appear this
morning before the Helsinki Commission, and I appreciate this
invitation today to testify.
You and Chairman Smith have been particularly strong in
your fight against all forms of human trafficking, not just
trafficking for forced prostitution, and that is very, very
much appreciated by the organizations in the advocacy
community. I was particularly heartened to see the hearing
before this committee in May on forced labor.
Over the years, the Helsinki Commission has steadfastly
fought to keep the view, to keep the focus on the victims of
human trafficking. And it's that perspective that I hope to
bring to bring to you today.
I lived in Russia for four years in the fight against
violence, against women and trafficking, and my favorite word
that I learned in Russia was ``konkretenosti,'' so I'll be very
concrete today. I've spent 17 years in the fight against human
trafficking, both as an activist and as an attorney. I
currently serve as pro bono counsel to the Freedom Network USA,
which is a coalition of 31 nongovernmental organizations and
leaders providing services to and advocating for the rights of
trafficking survivors here in the United States. The Freedom
Network was created in 2001, immediately following the
enactment of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act.
I've submitted lengthy testimony for this hearing, and I'd
ask that that lengthy testimony be placed in the record, but
I've changed my comments to fit the time allotted this morning.
And I'd just like to highlight three organized crime trends
that have been identified by advocates in the field, and also
three strategies for combating this grave human rights
violation. And then, finally, I'll provide some concrete
recommendations to the Commission.
So trend number one that I'd like to focus on is that human
trafficking is not only organized crime, it's what we might
call disorganized crime. Often today, in the United States, we
see human trafficking conducted by small groups operating
independently. In the words of Florrie Burke, a Freedom Network
leader and one of the leading experts on human trafficking in
the United States, quote, we are seeing more family-run
operations and small criminal networks. It is not the old
definition of organized crime, but it is just as dangerous.
Take the Carreto case, for example. In 2008, a diminutive
grandmother from Mexico pled guilty to sex trafficking for her
role in a family-run gang based in Tenancingo, Mexico.
According to the indictment, two of Ms. Carreto's sons and an
associate used, quote, physical violence, sexual assault,
threats of harm, deception, false promises and coercion to
force the women into forced prostitution in the United States.
The traffickers brought impoverished women from Mexico,
women and girls. They did so for more than a decade before they
were stopped by the Department of Justice. And in some cases,
the traffickers approached the young women in their villages
and claimed that they had fallen in love with them, tricked the
women, in some cases, impregnated them, and then held the
children back in Mexico as essentially hostages.
These organized groups are small and opportunistic and they
can be incredibly brutal. But that said, they don't have to
rely on extreme violence. Often, the threat of arrest,
detention and deportation by U.S. law enforcement is enough to
hold victims in servitude. Threats to family members and
especially to children in the country of origin often compel
the victims' compliance.
So let me move to the second trend that we've seen in the
field, trend two: Where are the prosecutions?
According to the State Department's Trafficking in Persons
Report, in 2010, there were just 6,017 prosecutions and 3,619
convictions. Those aren't statistics for the United States;
those are statistics for the entire world. In the United
States, in the same year, 2010, there were just 103 federal
prosecutions of 181 defendants, with 141 convictions. Now, in
light of the State Department's own estimate, that there are
between 14,500 and 17,500 trafficking victims brought into the
United States for forced labor and forced prostitution every
year, 103 prosecutions is appallingly low. In Europe, in 2010,
there were 2,803 prosecutions resulting in 1,850 convictions.
Again, these numbers should give us pause, because they
indicate that traffickers, whether they are members of
international criminal enterprises or syndicates, or solo
practitioners like so many of the traffickers I have sued as a
pro bono attorney here in the United States--families,
husbands, wives, diplomats who have brought individuals into
the United States and held them in forced labor--these
individuals enjoy near-complete impunity, and only a tiny
fraction of the prosecutions and convictions that have taken
place have been for forced labor.
Prosecutors are focusing on low-hanging fruit. They're
bringing prosecutions for sex trafficking. In Europe, for
example, of that enormous number, 2,803 prosecutions, only 47
were for forced labor. The rest were for forced prostitution,
trafficking for forced prostitution.
So let me turn now to trend number three, which is,
organized crime feeds on corruption.
Corruption is absolutely essential to traffickers' success.
I have testified before this Commission in the past about the
concrete cases of corruption that my colleagues and I at Human
Rights Watch documented in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
As reported in the Human Rights Watch publication, ``Hopes
Betrayed: Trafficking of Women and Girls to Post-Conflict
Bosnia & Herzegovina for Forced Prostitution,'' corrupt police
officers participated directly in trafficking. Some of the
police officers moonlighted as guards in brothels holding
trafficked women, helping to enforce their enslavement.
Traffickers provided pay-offs to local police in the form of
cash and free sexual services from the trafficked women
themselves. This was all in exchange for protection from raids.
Every time there was going to be a raid, the brothel owner
would get a call and a warning. The International Police Task
Force would arrive on the scene, and the women would all be
holding their passports. They had been instructed on exactly
what to say. All of this was made possible through official
corruption.
Corruption and organized crime and, indeed, those organized
criminals engaged in trafficking have a symbiotic relationship.
And yet corruption is one of the most under-reported elements
of human trafficking.
But for the victims, it is one of the most fundamental
elements because corruption is the backdrop to all of the
trafficking-related exploitation that they experience in the
United States. The women and children and men who are
trafficked into the United States fear that police officers are
simply in cahoots, in business with the traffickers, that
judges can easily be bought off and that prosecutors would
never zealously prosecute a trafficker. These beliefs are
common among the victims that we confront every day at the
Freedom Network, at the member organizations. Many of the
people we deal with, many of the victims come from countries
where corruption is utterly rife. And they assume that the
United States is no different. Indeed, that's what the
traffickers have told them.
The traffickers have told them time and time again that
once they are captured by U.S. law enforcement, they'll be
detained, they will be prosecuted, they will be deported. Some
have been told that they will disappear. For many of our
clients, a so-called rescue by Immigration and Customs
Enforcement is not a rescue. For them, it is the culmination of
all the horror stories that they have been told by the
traffickers. It is in their eyes an arrest. Victims from
countries where justice is bought and sold on a daily basis see
little hope of escape; they see little hope of justice; they
see little hope of prosecution. The traffickers stoke and
exploit these fears, telling them that the police are actually
on their side, that the police will help the traffickers. This
corruption silences the victims and it guarantees impunity.
So let's turn now to the strategies. The second portion of
the hearing is, strategies for combating human trafficking.
So strategy one, and this is essential: Protect the victims
and the witnesses. Trafficked men, women and children arrive on
the Freedom Network member organizations' doorsteps in very
different ways. Some have come through good Samaritans; some
have come through law enforcement; others find our
organizations through faith-based communities. But no matter
how they find the Freedom Network member organizations, these
victims have several things in common. First, they are highly
traumatized. Second, they are utterly terrified. And third,
they are concerned most about their family members back home in
the country of origin, particularly their children. A victim of
trafficking who is not safe cannot cooperate. In the face of
threats from the traffickers, she cannot testify against the
trafficker.
Now, the Trafficking Victims Protection Act provides tools
to protect the victims, but these tools are grossly, grossly
underused. One of the key building blocks here in the United
States is called continued presence. It's a temporary form of
immigration relief available only through an application by
federal enforcement officer. Continued presence, or CP, permits
victims of trafficking to remain in the United States during a
criminal investigation without fear of deportation. But the
number of victims receiving continued presence in the United
States has utterly plummeted. According the State Department
Trafficking in Persons Report in June 2011, 299 victims
received this very basic form of protection in 2009. But in
2010, that number dropped to 186.
It is not only victims of trafficking who need protection;
it is, indeed, their families. In the Carreto case, the forced
prostitution case that I mentioned earlier, the traffickers
and, in fact, the grandmothers--the mothers of the actual
traffickers operating in the United States--held the victims'
children hostage. According to Suzanne Tomatore, an attorney
and co-chair of the Freedom Network, Russian traffickers
currently operating in New York routinely terrify their victims
by bragging about links to organized crime back in the Russian
Federation. Family members, these women are told, will not be
safe unless they continue to work in strip clubs, they continue
surrendering all of their earnings.
So these cases, I think, speak very poignantly to the need
to protect not just victims in the United States where, I would
argue, we are falling down on the job, but also their family
members abroad. Family members should be paroled into the
United States. The categories for derivative status--because,
again, trafficking victims can get special visas known as T
visas, and their relatives, their very close relatives, can get
T-derivative--T-derivative visas--those lists, those categories
of individuals who are able to get T-derivative visas should be
expanded.
Now, strategy number two--and this has been raised, I
think, in the prior testimony: Watch not just the illegal
immigration streams but the legal immigration streams, and in
particular, watch the foreign labor recruiting organizations.
Traffickers are enormously clever. They are very what the
Russians would call ``gibka,'' which is flexible. They can
adapt quickly.
Consider the case of Askarkhodjaev, an Uzbek national. Now,
Mr. Andres has already told you a bit about this case, so let
me just fill in a few of the details. This Uzbek citizen and
his co-conspirators lived in Kansas City. According to the 90-
page indictment in this first case as a RICO criminal case
against a foreign labor recruiter, according to the 90-page
indictment, the traffickers charged their victims between 3,000
[dollars] to $5,000 to obtain temporary H-2B visas, employment
visas to work temporarily in the United States. The victims and
their families borrowed heavily to pay these enormous fees.
They were told, however, by the traffickers, that if they left
the exploitative labor conditions that they were held in in 14
states in the United States and if they returned home, their
families would have to pay an additional $5,000. The
traffickers not only did not pay them wages, did not pay them
overtime, but put them in apartment buildings, told them they
had to live there, charged them astronomical rents, and when
the victims actually did occasionally get a paycheck, sometimes
that paycheck was for negative earnings because they owed the
traffickers so much money.
Now, in that case, there was a guilty plea, which brings me
to the next point, another strategy for fighting human
trafficking: Grab the money.
Under U.S. law, restitution for trafficking victims is
mandatory. That's 18 USC 1593, part of the TVPA. That's the
law. But the reality that the advocates see in the field is
quite different.
In the experience of Freedom Network members, restitution
orders are rarely collected. In some cases, the seized assets
go directly to government coffers. In other cases, the U.S.
Attorney's Office does not enforce the restitution orders
aggressively. Restitution orders must be enforced. And in the
first instance, it is the federal government's responsibility
to do so.
Now, why? Why does restitution matter? As we've all heard
today, human trafficking is highly, highly lucrative. And
seizing criminals' assets, to some extent, will deter their
crime. Enforcing restitutions renders trafficking slightly less
lucrative. And second, trafficking victims are owed these
funds. This is money that was stolen from them. When asked
several years ago how much restitution was actually ever
distributed to the victims, the Department of Justice just
responded that they didn't collect these statistics. The
Department of Justice should track the amounts of restitution
not just ordered by the courts but the actual amount of
restitution that's collected. There is no higher use for
organized crimes' ill-gotten gains than the restoration of the
victims. So we need a scorecard: how much was ordered, how much
collected.
I have a host of recommendations, but I will just highlight
a few this morning.
First is increase the use of continued presence. The
Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act had a
section on lowering the standard slightly for continued
presence. It is important to do so, so that law enforcement
will use this tool to protect victims.
Again, increase the categories available for T visa
derivative status to permit more family members to come in the
United States.
Ensure that trafficking victims are not held in immigration
detention, because some are.
Increase the attention in the State Department's
Trafficking in Persons Report to the role of corruption in
human trafficking. This should include trafficking by state
officials, including a focus on diplomats trafficking domestic
workers for forced labor to the United States and around the
world.
Include fraud in foreign labor contracting as a RICO
predicate act. As you've heard today, we see much fraud in
foreign labor recruiting, and that is one of the main, main
methods used today by traffickers.
And then finally, request a Government Accountability
Office study on the collection of criminal restitution orders
in human trafficking cases.
So I will leave it at that. I appreciate your concern and
your focus on this issue. And I'm happy to entertain any
questions.
Mr. Rubio. Thank you. And what I want to focus today on my
questions with you on is mostly the U.S. aspect of it. And
here's why--not because the global one isn't--it's very
important. I think in order for us to have credibility on this
issue globally as policymakers, as a government, as members of
this Commission, we have to say that we ourselves are employing
the best practices. You have to hold yourself up to that
standard, and you have to lead by example. And I think we
should never underestimate what an example America can be.
So what I want to explore with you a little bit is when you
talked about the legal immigration streams. My guess is that--
and really, let's explore the forced labor aspect of it--not
that the sex trafficking is not egregious and outrageous; it
is, and we should focus on that as well, and it's probably
coming through some of the same streams. But I think the one
that--correct me if I'm wrong, but the one that probably gets
less attention but is a big problem nonetheless is the forced
labor one, because it can get nebulous. So my first question--
walk me through a little bit of what a typical--I would imagine
the majority of these people that are in forced labor actually
enter legally through one of these foreign worker programs.
Walk me through what that experience is like for the trafficked
person. You are in a society where somehow someone reaches out
to you and says: There's jobs available in the United States.
This is how much they will pay. I mean, walk us through how
that works and how they navigate the existing legal immigration
process to bring people here.
Ms. Vandenberg. I can give you two examples. One is here--
right here in Washington, D.C. It's a case that I brought
against a Tanzanian diplomat here.
Mr. Rubio. And it's a typical--
Ms. Vandenberg. It's typical--
Mr. Rubio. Except for the diplomat part, is that pretty
prevalent? The diplomat--
Ms. Vandenberg. No, in Washington, D.C. and surrounds we
see a large number of cases of trafficking by diplomats. So in
this particular case the diplomat in Tanzania recruited a young
woman to come to the United States and serve as a nanny. Got
her a visa--an A-3 visa--a visa reserved for diplomats to bring
over domestic workers to the United States. When she arrived in
the United States, according to the complaint that we filed and
according to testimony that she actually gave before the House
Foreign Affairs Committee, he refused to pay her.
He took her passport away and forced her to work 17 hours a
day for free. She was not allowed to leave the house. She was
cut off from her family entirely. Because her visa--that A-3
visa--was completely bound to her employer, the moment she
walked out the employer's door she was out of status. That is
one of the things in all of these visa schemes that makes it so
frightening for the victims. They understand that if they leave
the trafficker they are immediately in undocumented status.
Now, the other case I want to highlight is, again, this
Uzbek trafficking case. We call it the Giant Labor Solutions
case. In this particular case--and again the defendant
Askarkhodjaev pled guilty in this case and was sentenced to 12
years--the scheme there, according to the criminal indictment,
was to find individuals already in the country with legal
visas, whether they be J-1s or other--B-1, B-2--other visa
status--and tell them, OK, we can get you an H-2B visa.
And then they would file false statements to the Department
of Labor to try and get a certification, because in order to
bring someone in on an H-2B visa, you don't necessarily need a
name--you don't need the name of the immigrant. What you need
are a number of slots. And you need a labor certification
stating that you can't find U.S. domestic workers willing to
fill those slots.
And so the indictment actually covered the failure to--
first fraudulent submissions made to the Department of Labor
indicating that there were companies that needed these slots,
and then also the indictment covered the traffickers switching,
if you will--when the individuals came in on these H-2--H-2B
visas or when they received H-2B visas, they were not put in
the slots. They were not put in the jobs that had been
certified by the Department of Labor. They were moved all
around the country and put in different billets.
So from the perspective of the victim--and I've seen this
in many of the pro bono cases that we have brought on behalf of
victims--from the perspective of the victim, he or she believes
that he or she is coming to the United States legally. He or
she will make significant amounts of money, certainly enough to
pay off the labor recruiter, or to pay off all the debts that
they've incurred at home and that the family has incurred at
home. And they believe that they will have a normal job--that
they will be able to leave during the day after work, that they
will still have their passport, that they'll earn a salary.
And so the shock when they come here is that they are bound
to the employer, many times the employer takes their passport.
They are held in squalid conditions. I had one case where a
trafficking victim was forced to sleep on a kitchen floor like
a dog. And they realize that if they leave they risk being
undocumented. And they risk deportation. And they are
terrified, particularly in this immigration environment in the
United States.
Mr. Rubio. Most of these victims are cut off from all
information? I mean, do they a have access to television? Do
they have any time, typically do they have any access to any
news or information?
Ms. Vandenberg. They have two things. One, if they have
come in in the last few years, since the 2008 reauthorization,
the Department of States consular officials now give a brochure
to every single individual coming to the United States on a
work visa. And that brochure is a--
Mr. Rubio. In their native language?
Ms. Vandenberg. They--it's not always in their native
language.
Mr. Rubio. OK.
Ms. Vandenberg. It's been translated by the Department of
State into about 11 languages. That brochure, however, which I
think is the product of one of the finest public-private
partnerships I've seen under the Obama administration--the
Department of State cooperated with the nongovernmental
organizations and together created this pamphlet. The pamphlet
has the phone number on it for the national hotline and--so
that National Human Trafficking Resource Center hotline is
listed on the brochure. And there have been literally thousands
of calls that have been prompted by people having the brochure.
Now, in my experience, with the trafficking victims that I
have represented in pro bono civil suits and from the cases
that we've seen with Freedom Network members, the victims may
be able to watch television to some extent, although in my
experience--particularly with domestic workers--the moment they
sit down to watch television they're told to get up and start
working. You know, go iron the curtains. I mean, there's always
some work that is created for them so that they don't have the
opportunity to sit down.
Their access to telephones is very limited. They're not
generally allowed to call anyone. They're not generally allowed
to have cell phones. And so that isolation makes it very
difficult as well.
I have seen cases where trafficking victims have come to
the United States and have gone into, you know, debt to their
employers, who refuse to pay them and then charge them all
sorts of fees. And literally, those folks have contacted their
relatives in the country of origin to ask those relatives to
send money to them in the United States. The entire point of
migration by people who become trafficking victims is to come
to the United States to earn money so that they remit it home
to their families and children.
Mr. Rubio. This hotline that you have, has there been any
effort to create public service announcements on news outlets
that may reach migrant communities?
Ms. Vandenberg. There has. And Mary Ellison, who's from the
Polaris Project, which actually runs the hotline, is here
today. There is, I think, a provision in the current draft of
the TVPRA to increase the amount of publicity for the hotline.
And the hotline is now posted quite significantly around the
country. So there have been a large number and a growing number
of calls.
Mr. Rubio. I get--and well, who is it that runs the
hotline?
Ms. Vandenberg. Mary Ellison. Mary--
Ms. Ellison. Yes.
Mr. Rubio. Hi. Just a followup that I would have is, I
think one of the things we could and should explore is whether
some of the national networks and local affiliates that--
particularly broadcast--whether they're local stations, or
broadcast, say, the Spanish networks or that broadcast to
migrant communities would be willing to run public service
announcements highlighting this issue. And in particular--
you're right. I mean, there are certain things that are not
legal. If these things are happening to you, it's not normal,
it's not legal, and this is a number you can call. Obviously it
leads us to the--
Ms. Vandenberg. The Department of Homeland Security has
actually created two public service announcements, that are
done both in English and I think they're also available in
Spanish, that they're planning to blast across the country.
Mr. Rubio. OK.
Ms. Vandenberg. The one thing I would say about public
service announcements is that it's very important to involve
the nongovernmental organizations in the creation and vetting
of those public service announcements. We recently sent a
letter to the Department of Homeland Security with exactly that
point, because the nongovernmental organizations have by far
the greatest experience with victims of trafficking, and a much
better sense, I think, of what will bring the message home to
them.
Mr. Rubio. Because I think you're dealing with this a lot,
our existing visa programs--and obviously not to wade too far
into another debate, which is politically problematic for a lot
of people--but our existing visa programs, in and of itself,
are bureaucratic, complicated, burdensome, difficult to
navigate.
To what extent is that utilized by traffickers? To what
extent they figured out how to maximize it? And to what extent
would reforms to those programs be devastating? In essence, are
there specific reforms to those programs that we should
explore, and what are they, to help make it harder for these
trafficking operations to function?
Ms. Vandenberg. Ironically, it is the difficulty of getting
into the United States--it is the difficulty of getting a U.S.
visa that traffickers exploit, because you need someone to help
you. People sometimes will go to individuals they think are
smugglers to help smuggle them into the United States because
of, again, the very fierce immigration regime that the United
States has, only to learn that those smugglers aren't actually
smugglers. Those smugglers are actually traffickers.
But let me give you an example of how traffickers are so
incredibly nuanced and subtle in their crimes. I recently met
with Paul Fishman, who's the U.S. attorney for New Jersey. And
that office--the U.S. Attorney's Office in New Jersey brought a
very important case out of Newark. It was a case of 20 or so
young girls brought from Togo and Ghana--brought to Newark,
forced to work in hair-braiding salons. They would spend 16, 17
hours a day braiding hair. They got to keep none of the money
that they earned. They were abused, again, held in conditions
of squalor by the traffickers.
In that case, the question is, how did those young girls
get here from Togo? How did they get here from Africa? The
trafficker, who was actually a very well-respected
businesswoman, realized that people who had won the green card
lottery in Africa couldn't necessarily come to the United
States because even once you win the lottery it costs quite a
lot of money to facilitate all of the paperwork that you have
to do.
So she, a very experienced businesswoman, said I will pay
all those fees. I will help you with all the paperwork. All you
have to do is bring in this young girl as your daughter. And so
she paid off a number of individuals to bring in these
children. The children were then turned over to the traffickers
in the United States--part of the same network. And in this
case, again, it was a family network--a wife, a husband and her
son--who ran the entire network, which over time earned about
$4 million in proceeds.
And when those children arrived in the United States they
were handed over to the network, and they were put in these
hair-braiding salons.
Mr. Rubio. Basically, the complexity and expense associated
with it creates an environment conducive for middlemen. And
oftentimes, the middlemen are traffickers who help you because
they can front the money and help you navigate the complicated
process, but once you're here you're at their mercy.
Ms. Vandenberg. That's exactly right. And once you're here
you may owe them money. And once you're here you are--you are
constantly under the threat of deportation. Yeah.
Mr. Rubio. You talked about how the CP process is not being
used as often. Is there any reason that you've been told why
that's the case? Or do we know why--I'm sure there's an
explanation. I don't know what it is, but--
Ms. Vandenberg. Yeah, we have racked our brains on this
one. And the NGOs have asked precisely this question, because
as a representative, as an advocate and an attorney for
trafficking survivors, whenever I go to the Department of
Justice and my client submits to an interview with the FBI or
ICE or the Department of Justice, we always ask for continued
presence. It's always sort of one of the very first things on
our agenda, so that the client is safe and can continue to
cooperate.
My feeling is that the problem is threefold. One, the
standard is too high. Right now the law enforcement authorities
have to certify that someone is a victim of a severe form of
trafficking. After one interview with the victim, it is very
hard for a law enforcement officer to sign a declaration saying
this person is a victim of human trafficking. And they're
afraid to do so.
The second is I think that law enforcement personnel still
need more training. I think they are still convinced, many of
them, that trafficking requires snarling dogs, barbed wire,
being chained to a radiator and high levels of physical
violence. And what we saw, and what we see now with human
trafficking is that that level of violence is unnecessary.
Indeed, the entire creation of the forced labor statute in
the 2000 TVPA, if you go back and look at the legislative
history--the entire purpose for passing that statute was to, in
a sense, go past Kosminski, the lead Supreme Court case on
involuntary servitude, and to show that a far lesser degree--
far more subtle forms of coercion, far more subtle threats,
threats against third parties--that all of those things are
enough. The problem, I think, is that law enforcement is still
looking for rapes, sexual assaults, and snarling dogs. And
those things are not always present. I think the third problem
is there's a conflation of two different standards. There's the
standard for CP, and the standard for CP should be available
even after just one interview with the victim--
Hello.
Mr. Cohen. Steve Cohen of Memphis.
Ms. Vandenberg. Hi, Commissioner Cohen. Welcome. Thank you.
But the second standard is for T visas. When you file for a
T visa, if you are lucky--and it doesn't happen very often--if
you are lucky, you get what's called a Sup B--an I-914 Sup B,
which is a certification by law enforcement that this is indeed
a trafficking case. And I fear that law enforcement has
confused these two standards. The standard for CP is much
lower. It should be just that we have an investigation going
on. The standard for a T visa is, this is a human trafficking
case, and I certify that it is a crime. I fear that those are
getting muddled.
Mr. Rubio. And my last question is, the trafficking cases
like the one you outline from Ghana and other places--they have
to have markers. There has to be certain markers to a typical
case that raise a red flag. I would imagine two things; you
correct me if I'm wrong. Number one is, there are certain
markers that you would see in a trafficking case that you
wouldn't see in another clear-cut case, right? If someone's
coming in to work at an elementary initial level, an ability to
differentiate between those that clearly look legitimate and
those that have some markers to it.
And the other is, there's got to be some best practices.
There's got to be organizations out there that we know are not
traffickers and are involved in the process of recruiting
foreign workers, and--as opposed to those we've never heard of
before or are new to the marketplace or et cetera.
So for lack of a better term, we know what the routes are.
We know where the places are that people are coming through. We
know what some of the markers are. Isn't there something to be
said again, for lack of a better term, profiling some of these
cases, flagging them, understanding cases that bring three or
four elements that, at a minimum, require an additional level
of scrutiny? You talked about the diplomat case, for example. I
imagine there are legitimate diplomats that are bringing people
in and are really working and doing OK, and then there are
others that maybe we had bad experiences with.
Is there a role for that in the initial process, in the
initial visa process of trying to--I don't know if the word is
profile, but certainly identify cases that raise certain red
flags and maybe, at the front end, would provide more scrutiny
and follow-up? And I know a lot of that is a matter of
resources.
Ms. Vandenberg. So let me start with the diplomats. There
are diplomats who are what I would call repeat offenders. These
are diplomats who bring in domestic worker after domestic
worker after domestic worker. And what happened to all of the
other domestic workers before who ran away or who went home
without warning is a mystery. So I think that the State
Department should definitely be looking for what I would call
serial domestic worker visas.
Mr. Rubio. How do we find who they are? How do I get the
name of those people?
Ms. Vandenberg. Oh. Call me.
Mr. Rubio. OK.
Ms. Vandenberg. But I think the State Department legal
office actually, I think, has a sense. And because of the
changes that you made in the 2008 TVPRA, that reauthorization,
they are now required to track these things. And they are
supposed to--at least to put red flags in the system so that
individuals who are accused of exploitation on numerous
occasions cannot get more visas, which is a good sign.
In terms of the red flag and what we need to watch, I think
you really put your finger on it when you said our immigration
scheme is complex and difficult, and you need a middleman. We
need to be looking at the middlemen. We really need to be
focusing on labor recruiters. And one of the things that has
recently happened--and a representative from the Department of
Labor who appeared before this Commission in the May forced
labor hearing talked about this a little bit--there are now
regulations on the H-2A visas that indicate that you cannot, as
a foreign labor recruiter, demand fees from the actual
employees that you're bringing to the United States. Senator
Cardin at that hearing asked a very important question, which
is, how do you enforce that? How are you enforcing that?
And so the nongovernmental organizations and the Freedom
Network advocates and others put forward a proposal for
enhanced regulation of foreign labor recruiters. Again, the
nongovernmental organizations also put forward a proposal to
make fraud and foreign labor recruiting a RICO predicate act so
that criminal cases can be brought in these cases.
It is highly troubling that there are labor recruiting
agencies who are able to bring over not just hundreds, but
thousands of individuals who then find themselves in situations
of exploitation in the United States. And let's be fair: Not
all of those situations of exploitation rise to the level of
human trafficking, which is a high bar, but labor exploitation
in the United States is rife.
What I can say is that what I see, even with my clients,
even with the victims of human trafficking I've represented pro
bono, even with those individuals after they get T visas and
everything in the United States is supposed to be terrific, I
have seen, time and time again, those victims end up with
exploitative employers who do not pay the minimum wage, who do
not pay them overtime when they work overtime. And that level
of labor exploitation that occurs in the grey economy, even for
people with legal visa status, is very, very problematic.
So the NGOs, the nongovernmental organizations have called
for greater involvement by the Department of Labor and greater
enforcement of labor exploitation laws generally because that
will change the playing field. If labor exploitation is focused
upon, then trafficking will be also more difficult to commit,
or at least noticed more frequently.
HON. STEVE COHEN, COMMISSIONER, COMMISSION ON SECURITY AND
COOPERATION IN EUROPE
Mr. Cohen. Thank you. I appreciate the work you do, and you
do most of it pro bono, and you're to be commended and thanked
by this Commission and by our government. But let me ask you
about the labor exploitation. In what fields is that mostly
taking place in?
Ms. Vandenberg. It's a wide variety of fields. And if you
look at the cases that the Department of Justice has prosecuted
and should get tremendous credit for prosecuting, they run the
gamut from, as I mentioned, hair-braiding salons in Newark, New
Jersey, to nail salons all up and down the Eastern Seaboard, to
agricultural labor in Florida, harvesting of beans; hotel work,
hospitality work. There was one particularly egregious in South
Dakota that was prosecuted by the Department of Justice where a
husband-and-wife team brought in a group of workers from the
Philippines, some of them with master's degrees in hospitality,
and told them that they would be sort of running a hotel, and
when they arrived, they were basically forced to work around
the clock, many of them doing housekeeping services in the
hotel rooms. So it really runs the gamut.
Most of the people that I represent in civil cases,
including a RICO civil case that we brought in the Eastern
District of Wisconsin against what we called a family criminal
enterprise, most of the people I've represented are domestic
workers.
Mr. Cohen. Is there any particular corporation that we
might know about that has some dirty little secret that uses
labor exploitation that you would like to reveal at this time?
Ms. Vandenberg. I'm going to take the UNODC approach to
this and not name any names. But I would say that the
organizations that are doing labor recruiting, and they are
certainly known to the Department of State and to the
Department of Homeland Security, those organizations need to be
monitored to make sure that the visa applications and the
Department of Labor certifications that they are submitting are
accurate and not fraudulent.
I will say that there are number of companies that are now
facing civil lawsuits. The Southern Poverty Law Center has
brought a lawsuit on behalf--it's actually, I think, now been
certified as a class action--brought on behalf of workers
brought into the United States from India, including high-
skilled workers like welders and other skilled builders in the
wake of Hurricane Katrina. And so the Southern Poverty Law
Center is now pursuing a lawsuit that's been written up in The
New York Times on a number of occasions for allegations of
trafficking those workers to work in Mississippi and the Gulf
states.
Mr. Cohen. When people hear about human trafficking, I
think they normally think of sexual exploitation and bringing
in from Eastern Europe or wherever. What percentage of the
problem is indeed in that capacity, as distinguished from
ordinary labor?
Ms. Vandenberg. You know, it's a very difficult question to
answer, and the statistics on this are very problematic. But I
would say that the best statistics on this are the
International Labor Organization's statistics. And the
International Labor Organization has said that there are
approximately 12.3 million people around the world who are held
in forced labor. Now, the ILO's understanding of that is that
of that, some subset, 2.4 million, are held in conditions that
they would consider trafficking.
Now, when the International Labor Organization sort of
breaks that down in terms of forced labor as opposed to forced
prostitution as opposed to sexual exploitation of children, I
think the numbers get a little bit murkier there. And part of
the reason is because in many of the forced labor cases that we
have seen with the Freedom Network members, particularly forced
labor cases involving children, it is not just forced labor;
many of the children are also sexually violated. So many of the
children are raped and sexually abused when they're in
situations of forced labor.
So it's a difficult question to answer, but I think
Congressman Smith has said in the past, as have many others,
that forced labor is actually the majority of trafficking that
we see around the world, number one. Number two, it is what I
always call the caboose of the human trafficking train, because
it's the most forgotten, the most ignored, the least discussed.
And third, it is the least prosecuted. I mentioned some
statistics, then: You know, of the 2,803 prosecutions in
Europe, 47 of them were for forced labor.
And so there is this danger, I think, in law enforcement,
to go after the easy stuff. The easy stuff, in a sense, is
forced prostitution and street prostitution. It's very easy to
go after those cases. It's fairly obvious. It's our traditional
view of forced--of--it's our traditional view of trafficking.
As you say, it's the kind of trafficking that we read about in
the newspaper. Forced labor is harder to find. It takes far
more effort to find forced labor. And unfortunately, that kind
of effort is not being expanded.
Mr. Cohen. I did not have the opportunity to hear your
opening statement, which I wish I could have, and I don't think
it's in our books. So you may have answered this already, but
are there recommendations that you have for laws that need to
be tweaked in our country?
Ms. Vandenberg. I included in my remarks 12
recommendations, so a host of----
Mr. Cohen. Oh, OK. Keep me busy.
Ms. Vandenberg. ----a host of recommendations. They're not
all legislative.
What I would say is, the Freedom Network members have been
making the rounds in meeting with many, many members, both of
the House and the Senate, including Senator Rubio's staff, to
talk about the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization
that is up this year. And the members of the nongovernmental
organization communities really feel that this reauthorization
is enormously important.
So the current legislative ball that we have our eye on is
the TVPRA and the importance of passing the TVPRA, which has
some elements that we asked for and some elements that we did
not--that we requested and did not get. So, for example, the CP
changes to protect victims, those are in the House version;
they're not in the Senate version. The foreign labor recruiting
provisions that had been requested were in the House bill but
now have been stripped out. The Senate bill includes a request
for a GAO study to look at foreign labor recruiting. So at a
minimum, I think the GAO study should go forward. But I think
the NGO community feels very, very strongly that the TVPRA is
sort of the most important piece of legislation that could pass
in the near future.
Mr. Cohen. Thank you very much for your time and for your
work, and I appreciate it. And Senator Rubio, thank you for
your time. I yield back.
Mr. Rubio. Thank you for your testimony. Thank you all for
being here. And the Commission is adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 11:30 a.m., the hearing was adjourned.]
A P P E N D I C E S
Prepared Statement of Hon. Christopher H. Smith, Chairman, Commission
on Security and Cooperation in Europe
I'd like to welcome everybody today to the Helsinki Commission
hearing on human trafficking and transnational organized crime. This
hearing is part of the Commissions long standing efforts at examining
this modern day scourge in all its facets. I'd like to thank my
esteemed colleagues here with me at this hearing, especially Senator
Rubio as a new Commissioner in his first Commission hearing.
In 1998, I first introduced the Trafficking Victims Protection Act.
One year later, as Chair of this Commission I held its first hearing on
human trafficking. Today, I am proud to say that it has been 11 years
since the original TVPA was passed--the most comprehensive and
significant piece of anti-trafficking legislation the United States
has. Soon, both the House and Senate will be debating its fourth
reauthorization since it originally passed back in 2000 and each time I
have worked to strengthen its protection for victims and punishment for
traffickers.
Our efforts are often informed by the combined work of governments,
international organizations and civil society, all of which are
represented at this hearing, in combating modern-day slavery. Through
their outstanding work we have made it a point to continually draw
attention to this issue, and we will not stop until slavery becomes a
thing of the past.
Unfortunately, human trafficking and organized crime have co-
existed for centuries. But whereas the slave in the 1800's would have
to be traded under perilous conditions for the modern day equivalent of
thousands of dollars, today with just the click of a button you can
purchase somebody's life for just a couple of hundred, maybe less.
Modern technology and a collapsing world economy have doubled the
amount of people in bondage throughout the world as were taken from
Africa 350 years ago. As scores of people search for a beacon of hope
in developed societies, organized criminals from the ``under and
upper'' world stand by to seize the moment, enslave the weak and turn a
profit. This multi-billion dollar industry presents a threat to human
security at all levels.
Not only do countless men, women and children suffer at the hands
of traffickers, but the enormous amount of profits made in this
industry serve to corrupt officials at all levels. Former and current
members of the security sector, including law enforcement and the
military can be found in key roles in many trafficking rings. From
corrupt police, to dishonest prosecutors, judges, and politicians,
efforts are made to undermine the fight to end modern day slavery
worldwide.
Even as we've looked to discourage traffickers by adding provisions
to our laws that promote long jail sentences, asset confiscation and
sanctions to governments who fail to meet the minimum standards, the
sheer profit gained by the exploitation of human beings now rivals that
of the drug trade.
Whereas drug traffickers must engage in extreme violence by
murdering informants and engaging in war with criminal rivals to remain
in control of their networks, human traffickers need only threaten
their victims or their families with violent reprisals to remain in
control of their slaves.
Whereas drug traffickers have a commodity that can only be sold
once, a human trafficker can purchase a slave and continually exploit
them until he's made his money back. And after that it's all profit.
With such high profits to be made and relative low risk, it is no
wonder why more and more organized criminal groups are engaging in
human trafficking.
The growing ingenuity of organized criminal groups; a borderless
world for crime; and the use of modern technologies, have made it
increasingly difficult for law enforcement to gather data on the extent
that transnationally organized criminals are involved in human
trafficking.
But we know enough to know that something has to be done before
it's too late. We hope that our distinguished panel of experts can shed
some light on this problem.
Today we are joined by a panel of experts on transnational
organized crime and human trafficking. Their combined expertise should
paint us a clearer picture of organized crime's involvement in human
trafficking and what we can do to help stop it. With us is Mr. Greg
Andres the current Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Crime
Division where he supervises the Organized Crime Section at the
Department of Justice. Mr. Andres comes to us with over a decade of
experience working on organized crime issues.
We are also joined by Mr. Piero Bonadeo, Deputy Representative for
the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime in New York. Mr. Bonadeo's
testimony will bring the UNODC's years of expertise in combating
Transnational Organized Crime. Finally we have, Ms. Martina Vandenberg.
Ms. Vandenberg is a seasoned attorney with years of experience
combating trafficking in persons, as well as human rights reporting in
Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Russian Federation, Uzbekistan and Kosovo.
All of which are countries of great interest to our Helsinki
Commission.
We look forward to your testimonies.
Prepared Statement of Hon. Benjamin L. Cardin, Co-Chairman, Commission
on Security and Cooperation in Europe
I would like to extend my thanks to the distinguished panel of
experts present today at this hearing. There is no timelier topic than
trafficking in persons, as Congress will soon debate the William
Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2011
(TVPRA).
The Helsinki Commission has been devoted to the fight against
trafficking in human beings in the United States and internationally
for more than 20 years. Now more than ever, as the world struggles
through economic turmoil and traffickers take advantage of the
impoverished and vulnerable, we must remain committed to this fight. In
my capacity as Chairman and now Co-Chairman of the Helsinki Commission
I contributed to the 2008 TVPRA. Additionally, I convened several
hearings to galvanize U.S. government contributions to the Organization
for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in its efforts to combat
this trend. The OSCE remains a leader among multilateral organizations
in facilitating international coordination to end trafficking and we
must better utilize its unique competencies.
Today, millions of people want to escape their impoverished
situation in search for a better life for themselves and their
families. Unfortunately, traffickers know this and exploit their
vulnerabilities. It's a sad reality when human life has been
transformed into a marketable commodity to which unscrupulous criminals
have turned to and yet receive lesser sentences than those who traffic
drugs. This fact is most evident when you look at prisons throughout
the world filled with drug traffickers in contrast to the few and
declining number in international convictions for human trafficking,
making trafficking in human beings a high-profit low-risk crime.
Even as we build momentum and awareness to combat trafficking in
persons, criminals have not slowed down their operations. They are
finding new ways to avoid law enforcement, adapting their operations to
the effects of globalization and exploiting modern technology to
broaden the scope of their illicit enterprises. Without a doubt, the
new age slave trade is a transnational crime that bears resemblance to
its tumultuous history, yet finds new sophisticated ways to maintain
its grip besides our most guided efforts.
Whether it's major international and highly structured criminal
organizations like the Russian or Albanian Crime Syndicates or loosely
connected networks of specialized criminal entrepreneurs, trafficking
in human beings is mostly the business of organized crime. The
diversity in actors engaged in human trafficking demonstrates the
complexity and danger of this heinous crime. It also demonstrates how
many vile people out there are willing to enslave others for personal
profit.
Trafficking networks often run alongside other forms of organized
crimes like migrant and drug smuggling, money laundering, fraud and
corruption. Porous borders, corrupt officials and high unemployment
rates are among the many factors that fuel this grievous crime.
Our own backyards have been polluted by this scourge, as organized
criminal gangs are engaging in prostitution rings using the internet to
recruit and exploit women and children into a life of sexual slavery.
High profile cases of labor trafficking have also demonstrated how
complex this crime can really be. Labor trafficking rings have brought
hundreds of legal migrants into our country under what seem like
legitimate businesses. These criminal truly operate transnationally in
such an organized matter, that they enslave their employees in front of
our very eyes and we do not see it.
Last month, the OSCE Office of the Special Representative and
Coordinator for Combating Trafficking in Human Beings organized an
expert seminar on leveraging anti-money laundering regimes to combat
human trafficking. At this event experts and scholars alike, including
some from United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC), came
together to ponder the emerging challenges of this transnational crime.
Innovative efforts like this to increase our comprehensive response to
trafficking and identification capacity are vital.
The U.S. Government as well as the many multilateral organizations
like the OSCE and the United Nations recognizes trafficking for sexual
and labor exploitation as a threat to security and peace keeping
efforts. The United Nations Convention against Transnational Crime and
its Protocols and the recently released White House Strategy to Combat
Transnational Organized Crime have both recognized this fact. It is
essential that we enhance our political commitments in these venues to
match the evolving trends of exploitation and counter the increasing
sophistication of organized trafficking networks.
I thank our accomplished witnesses for joining us today to help us
formulate more effective strategies to address these new challenges. I
look forward to their contributions.
Prepared Statement of Hon. Marco Rubio, Commissioner, Commission on
Security and Cooperation in Europe
The Helsinki Commission has chosen to hold a hearing entitled
``Human Trafficking and Transnational Organized Crime,'' to address the
growing problem of human trafficking as part of organized crime in the
United States and abroad.
The United States is plagued by the issue of human trafficking with
an estimated 17,000 new victims each year and with a global estimate of
700,000-800,000 new victims. My home state of Florida is one of the top
destinations in the United States for victims to be trafficked. While
this modern slavery comes in many shapes and sizes, there has been an
emergence of transnational organized crime groups engaging in this
horrendous trade.
Groups which have traditionally specialized in the drugs
trafficking, arms trafficking, money laundering and fraud have expanded
their operations to include slavery due to the lucrative nature of this
industry. Human trafficking is estimated to create $32 billion profits
annually, making it the second largest crime industry. Transnational
organized crime groups recognize that unlike drugs or arms, human
beings can be exploited, over and over again which results in larger
profits.
Since the original Trafficking Victims Protection Authorization of
2000, the United States has been the global leader in combatting this
modern day slavery. Each year the State Department releases their
Trafficking in Persons Report that ranks countries all over the world
by their efforts to fight trafficking in all forms. The report forces
countries to take the battle against modern day slavery seriously and
brings this crime to the international spotlight. I have joined 28 of
my colleagues in cosponsoring the current human trafficking
legislation, Sec. 1301 The Trafficking Victims Protection
Reauthorization.
While key to the government's efforts to fight modern day slavery
is the structure provided by Sec. 1301, the fight against
transnational organized crime groups who engage in human trafficking is
not an easy one. There is no typical transnational organized group.
Groups vary in size from complicated networks to loosely tied cells.
Some of these groups may engage in numerous illicit activities while
others specialize in human trafficking. This variety makes the battle
to combat this issue even tougher.
We face numerous challenges when combatting transnational organized
crime including the lack of comprehensive law enforcement, poor
international cooperation, lack of data, and lack of awareness on the
subject matter. In particular, the crime of human trafficking is often
difficult to prove and even harder to prosecute. Law enforcement
officials must have special training to pursue these cases
correctly.Today, the Helsinki Commission addresses the issues faced by
the international community with fighting transnational organized crime
groups who engage in human trafficking. The United States and other
Operations and Security and Cooperation in Europe countries need to
continue to be vigilant against in the fight against human trafficking
and transnational organized crime.
Prepared Statement of Greg D. Andres, Deputy Assistant Attorney General
for the Criminal Division, U.S. Department of Justice
INTRODUCTION
Mr. Chairman, Mr. Co-Chairman, and distinguished Members of the
Committee: Thank you for inviting me to speak with you this morning
about the threat posed by human trafficking and transnational organized
crime, the efforts of the Department of Justice to address the threat,
and steps Congress can take that will assist in these efforts. I am
honored to appear before you on behalf of the Department of Justice.
The fight against transnational organized crime is one of the
highest enforcement priorities of the Department of Justice and the
Administration. Together with the United States Attorneys' Offices and
our many law enforcement partners, the Criminal Division investigates
and prosecutes cases involving transnational organized crime all over
the country, indeed, all over the world.
Transnational organized crime refers to self-perpetuating
associations of individuals who operate transnationally for the purpose
of obtaining power, influence, or commercial gains, wholly or in part
by illegal means. These organizations promote and protect their
activities through a pattern of violence and corruption, including by
insinuating themselves into the political process and becoming
alternate providers of governance, security, and livelihoods to win
popular support. In the process, transnational organized criminals are
often assisted by willing facilitators, including lawyers, bankers, and
business owners, who exploit their professional legitimacy to
perpetuate and disguise illegal activity and profits.
The convergence of threats posed by these groups is significant and
growing. In July of this year, the Administration released its Strategy
to Combat Transnational Organized Crime (``TOC Strategy''), which
enumerated the threats posed by transnational organized crime to United
States national security, including the following:
1. Penetration of State Institutions. Transnational organized
crime's penetration of governments is subverting the rule of
law, democratic institutions, and transparent business
practices. The growing reach of transnational organized
criminal networks is pushing them to seek strategic alliances
with state leaders and foreign intelligence services,
threatening stability and undermining free markets.
2. Threat to the U.S. and World Economy. Transnational
organized crime is increasing its subversion of legitimate
financial and commercial markets, threatening U.S. economic
interests and raising the risk of significant damage to the
world financial system.
3. Growing Cybercrime Threat. Transnational organized criminal
networks are becoming increasingly involved in cybercrime,
which costs consumers billions of dollars annually, creates
risks to sensitive corporate and government computer networks,
and undermines worldwide confidence in the international
financial system.
4. Threatening Crime-Terror Nexus. Terrorists and insurgents
are increasingly turning to crime to generate funding and
acquire logistical support.
5. Expansion of Drug Trafficking. Despite demonstrable
counterdrug successes in recent years, illicit drugs remain a
serious threat to the health, safety, security, and financial
well-being of U.S. citizens.
The TOC Strategy also identified Trafficking in Persons as a threat
posed by transnational organized crime to the United States, noting
that human traffickers target the trafficked person as an object of
criminal exploitation, often for labor or sexual exploitation purposes,
and that trafficking victims are frequently physically and
psychologically abused. The Strategy noted that human trafficking can
take place within as well as between countries.
At the announcement of the TOC Strategy, Attorney General Eric
Holder noted:
Today's criminal organizations are increasingly
sophisticated. They know no borders. They threaten the
stability of our financial system and the promise of a
competitive marketplace. And their operations are putting far
too many American businesses, government institutions,
consumers, and citizens at risk.
The TOC Strategy sets forth a whole-of-government response to these
threats. It outlines several strategic objectives at the heart of the
Administration's efforts to address this threat:
the protection of Americans from the harm, violence, and
exploitation of transnational criminal networks;
breaking the economic power of transnational criminal
networks and protecting strategic markets and the U.S. financial system
from penetration and abuse by transnational criminal organizations; and
defeating transnational criminal networks that pose the
greatest threat to national security by targeting their
infrastructures, depriving them of their enabling means, and preventing
the criminal facilitation of terrorist activities.
The Department of Justice is committed to the fight against
transnational organized crime and we have enjoyed certain successes to
date. Serious challenges remain and additional tools are needed. As
part of the TOC Strategy, the Administration has proposed a number of
important legislative improvements, which the Department believes could
assist us in meeting these challenges and addressing the identified
threats.
II. CURRENT SUCCESSES IN TRANSNATIONAL ORGANIZED CRIME
The Department has made great strides in attacking transnational
organized crime groups, particularly those with some physical presence
or foothold in the United States. We have prosecuted groups involved in
narcotics and narco-terrorism, kidnapping and extortion, and health
care and other identity fraud crimes alike. Below are several key
examples:
Joint Colombian-United States Drug Trafficking
Investigation: On September 2, 2011, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the
Southern District of Florida announced that 34 individuals were charged
in five separate indictments in an operation that targeted a Drug
Trafficking Organization based in Bogota, Colombia that utilized U.S.
registered aircraft to transport thousands of kilograms of cocaine from
South America, to clandestine airstrips in Central America and the
Caribbean region. The drug trafficking organization purchased U.S.
registered aircraft using nominees, who in turn submitted false
documentation to the Federal Aviation Administration to hide the
identities of the South American drug traffickers who were purchasing
the planes. The Colombian-based organization, which arranged for the
aircraft to depart from South America, had ties to drug trafficking
organizations in Mexico. During the course of the investigation, law
enforcement seized 1300 kilograms of cocaine, $1.6 million in U.S.
currency, and eight U.S. registered aircraft. The case is being
prosecuted by a special unit within the Southern District of Florida
that was established in February 2011, to prosecute the violent Bandas
Criminales drug trafficking groups in Colombia.
Armenian Health Care Fraud: In October 2010, the
Department announced charges against 73 members and associates of an
Armenian-American organized crime group, with ties abroad, in five
states (California, Georgia, New Mexico, New York and Ohio) for various
health care fraud-related crimes involving more than $163 million in
fraudulent billing. The defendants were charged with engaging in
numerous frauds, including sophisticated schemes to defraud Medicare
and insurance companies by submitting fraudulent bills for medically
unnecessary treatments or treatments that were never performed. As part
of this prosecution, the defendant Armen Kazarian became the first
``Vor'' or ``Thief-in-Law,'' convicted of racketeering in the United
States.
International Computer Hacking: In November 2009, charges
were filed based on a successful FBI investigation into a sophisticated
international computer hacking ring involving defendants from Estonia,
Russia, and Moldova. Various defendants were charged in the Northern
District of Georgia with hacking into a computer network operated by a
credit card processing company and using sophisticated techniques to
compromise the data encryption used to protect customer data on payroll
debit cards. Ultimately, counterfeit devices were employed to withdraw
over $9 million from more than 2,100 ATMs in at least 280 cities
worldwide, including cities in the United States, Russia, Ukraine,
Estonia, Italy, Hong Kong, Japan, and Canada. Remarkably, this loss
occurred within a span of less than 12 hours. Through this
investigation, the FBI uncovered a previously undetected hacking
technique that compromised the bank's encryption system. This
information was disseminated throughout the banking sector to prevent
further losses. Five Estonian defendants have been arrested and charged
in Estonia. One of those defendants was extradited to the United
States. Additionally, one defendant in the United States and two
defendants residing in Hong Kong were arrested for their involvement in
this criminal enterprise.
Armenian Power Takedown: In February 2011, federal
prosecutors from the United States Attorney's Office for the Central
District of California, the Southern District of Florida and the
Criminal Division announced charges against more than 100 members and
associates of Eurasian organized crime groups, in six indictments, in
four cities. The arrests included more than 80 defendants from the
Armenian Power group, who were charged with a wide variety of violent
and fraud-related crimes. The alleged crimes included kidnapping,
extortion, assault, witness intimidation, bank fraud, credit card fraud
and drug distribution. AP's membership consists primarily of
individuals whose heritage goes back to Armenia and other Eastern Bloc
countries. AP is an international organized crime group that started as
a street gang in East Hollywood, California in the 1980s.
Operation Whirling Dervish: In July 2011, the Department
announced charges resulting from a DEA narco-terrorism undercover
operation, charging three defendants with conspiring to provide various
forms of support to Hizballah, the PKK, and Pejak. Two defendants were
arrested in Bucharest, Romania, where they were detained pending
extradition to the United States; the third was arrested in the
Republic of the Maldives. This investigation was supported by Romanian
authorities who identified Kurdish PKK members that were selling heroin
to support their terrorist organization. It also identified Iranian
Pejak elements that were utilizing the drug trade to finance operations
and Hizballah elements that were attempting to purchase military-grade
weaponry. This investigation is continuing.
Eastern European Money Laundering: In June 2011, a joint
prosecution between the Criminal Division's Computer Crime and
Intellectual Property Section and the U.S. Attorney's Offices in
Chicago and Washington, D.C., resulted in a Romanian man being
sentenced to 48 months imprisonment in the United States for his role
in an international money-laundering scheme involving the creation of
fraudulent online auctions. In a similar case handled by the Criminal
Division's Organized Crime and Gang Section, a Bulgarian man was
sentenced this September to 64 months imprisonment for his role in an
auction scheme, which appears to have been orchestrated by a
transnational criminal group based in Eastern Europe. Another
individual, a Romanian citizen, was sentenced to 24 months imprisonment
for his role in the same conspiracy, also in September 2011. According
to court documents, in less than one year, the scheme netted more than
$1.4 million for U.S. victims.
Joint U.S.-Italian Mob Takedown: In March 2010
prosecutors in Sicily and the U.S. Attorney's Offices for the Eastern
District of New York and the Southern District of Florida arrested over
twenty individuals on charges of obstruction of justice, extortion,
concealment of assets, money laundering, drug trafficking, attempted
homicide and other crimes arising from their affiliation with Santa
Maria di Gesu, a Sicilian mafia family. The U.S. defendants
subsequently pled guilty, with one defendant receiving a sentence of 48
months and another receiving a sentence of 36 months.
The Department has also achieved successes in the fight against
human trafficking using the racketeering laws, as shown by these
examples:
Ukrainian Human Trafficking Ring: In October 2011, the
Department secured convictions against two brothers for a racketeering
conspiracy in connection with a human trafficking scheme that exploited
young Ukrainian migrants. The defendants smuggled the victims into the
U.S. through Mexico. The brothers confiscated their immigration
documents and forced them through threats, assaults, sexual abuse, and
debt bondage to work on cleaning crews in homes, stores, and offices
without pay.
Transnational Human Trafficking Enterprise: In May 2011
an Uzbek national was sentenced to 12 years in prison for racketeering
conspiracy involving the recruitment and exploitation of dozens of
workers from Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, the Philippines and
elsewhere, many of whom were recruited with false promises concerning
the terms, conditions and nature of their employment and then compelled
through threats of deportation and financial penalties to work in
hospitality jobs in at least 14 states. Eight other defendants,
including Uzbek, Moldovan, and U.S. national, were convicted in
connection with the scheme.
As is clear from many of the examples cited above, a key component
of our transnational organized crime strategy has been forging
successful and strategic partnerships with foreign law enforcement
authorities. The example of Romania is instructive. A significant
number of so-called ``phishing'' attacks targeting United States
citizens originate in Romania and we have worked closely with
authorities there to identify and prosecute those involved.2 As an
important first step, several law enforcement agencies, including the
Federal Bureau of Investigation, the United States Secret Service and
the Drug Enforcement Administration, have employees stationed in
Romania, who work side by side with Romanian law enforcement in an
effort to target cyber-criminals and other organized crime. The results
have been significant. Earlier this year, joint United States-Romanian
investigations resulted in the arrest of over 100 organized crime
related cyber-criminals in our two countries. Those arrests involved
various schemes involving the fake sales of merchandise, including cars
and boats, over the Internet to thousands of victims in the United
States and elsewhere.
Another important innovation critical to our efforts has been the
development of the International Organized Crime Intelligence and
Operations Center, or IOC-2, here in the Department of Justice.
Building on our successful counter-narcotics work, IOC-2 brings
together nine federal law enforcement agencies in a powerful center to
share data and intelligence, both domestically and internationally, on
organized crime investigations. IOC-2 greatly expands our abilities to
spot patterns and coordinate investigations against transnational
organized crime networks. IOC-2 also aids our attempts to identify
forfeitable assets associated with international criminal activities
and promote seizure and forfeiture judgments.
III. CHALLENGES TO GREATER SUCCESS
Our work on transnational organized crime enforcement is far from
over. While the threat is clear, the obstacles to successfully
investigating, prosecuting and dismantling these networks are numerous.
Transnational organized crime groups and the offenses they commit
present significant challenges. As a point of comparison, it has been
well documented that domestic organized crime syndicates employ tactics
that create many roadblocks for law enforcement: layers of secrecy,
corruption of officials, and fear and intimidation that silence
witnesses. Despite these challenges, over the years, Congress and the
Department of Justice have developed methods of attacking domestic
organized crime to the point where our record of achievements is one of
the federal government's great success stories. Transnational organized
crime poses an additional dimension of challenges: while the effects
are felt here in the United States, the perpetrators, witnesses and
evidence reside abroad, often in jurisdictions unable or unwilling to
cooperate with our investigative efforts.
Take a few simple examples. Organized cyber criminals direct cyber
intrusions from abroad that target United States citizens and steal
their identities for the purpose of raiding bank accounts or placing
fraudulent credit card purchases. Other organized criminals commit
crimes abroad and launder and maintain funds in the United States,
without ever traveling to our shores, and sometimes through the use of
U.S. shell corporations.
In each instance, the investigation and prosecutions of these
organizations and crimes pose significant challenges. At a minimum,
pursuing an investigation abroad is often time consuming and delays can
be significant and undermine an investigation. Tracking down criminals
abroad often requires the cooperation of foreign law enforcement
agencies and even if we locate our targets, many of the investigative
tools for gathering evidence are not available to us in an
international context. In some countries, we cannot employ Title III
wiretaps against the perpetrators, nor can we, in many cases, send an
undercover agent to gather incriminating statements. The country's law
enforcement agencies may not have the level of training or the
necessary technology to implement the investigative steps, even if they
are authorized.
Arresting lower level members of the organization and persuading
them to cooperate against higher level bosses is also extremely
difficult and may require the approval and cooperation of foreign
authorities, as well as navigating various domestic immigration and
other laws. Other countries have domestic laws which ban the
extradition of their own citizens to foreign countries for prosecution.
In such instances, the only option may be for the foreign government to
prosecute the target under their domestic laws, and convictions often
result in lenient sentences. Still other targeted organized crime
groups may have so penetrated the country's law enforcement entities or
political leadership that the country will refuse to answer our request
for assistance.
These concerns are not hypothetical. The prosecution, or the
attempted prosecution, of Semion Mogilevich makes this clear.
Mogilevich is a powerful Russian organized crime figure and the head of
an international criminal enterprise engaged in activities designed to
penetrate and corrupt strategic sectors world-wide. He and his co-
conspirators were indicted by the U.S. Attorney's Office for the
Eastern District of Pennsylvania in 2003 on racketeering, securities
fraud and money laundering charges, yet remain at liberty. At the heart
of the charged crimes was a sophisticated multi-million dollar scheme
responsible for defrauding thousands of investors in the United States,
Canada and abroad in the stock of a public company that was
headquartered in the United States. The indictment alleges that, while
residing in Eastern Europe, Mogilevich funded and controlled a criminal
enterprise, comprised of individuals and companies in over twenty
countries throughout the world, including corrupt accountants and
auditors, and numerous United States shell companies which were used to
conceal their involvement and to launder proceeds from the scheme.
Despite committing crimes here, Mogilevich remains outside our reach
and is believed to currently be residing in Moscow, Russia. He is
currently on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives List.
The ability of transnational criminal organizations to generate
vast sums of money is both their strength and a weakness. Criminal
organizations are businesses, and like any business profit is their
primary motivation. The wealth generated by today's drug cartels and
other international criminal networks enable some of the worst criminal
elements to operate with impunity while wreaking havoc on individuals
and institutions around the world. Generating proceeds often is only
the first step -criminals then launder their proceeds, often using our
financial system to move or hide their assets and often with the help
of third parties located in the United States. Indeed, international
criminal organizations increasingly rely on these third parties and on
the use of domestic shell corporations to mask crimes and launder
proceeds under the guise of a seemingly legitimate corporate structure.
We can use our asset forfeiture laws to take the assets away from the
criminal organizations and dismantle their financial infrastructures
but, as discussed below, the existing law needs to be modernized.
When we turn our attention to the specific problem of human
trafficking, we see these same challenges. Many of our human
trafficking cases involve loosely affiliated networks of individuals
engaged in the exploitation of human trafficking victims. These
criminals tend to utilize smuggling pipelines and money laundering
conduits operated by other criminal groups and whose services the
traffickers procure for their own purposes. On occasion the human
traffickers themselves belong to a larger organized crime group, as in
the two examples I mentioned above. Either way, we face the same
challenges in extending our investigation across borders and seeking
cooperation from law enforcement authorities in other countries as in
our other types of transnational organized crime cases.
IV. LEGISLATION
There are important steps we can take to better address
extraterritorial threats and the increasingly global reach of
transnational criminal organizations. The Department of Justice
together with our partners have developed a package of legislative
proposals to ensure that federal law keeps up with the rapid evolution
of organized criminal activity, including human trafficking. We need
changes to our existing money laundering, asset forfeiture, narcotics
and racketeering laws. Additional proposals recognize that in an
increasingly global law enforcement environment, witness security and
protection for foreign witnesses must also be available. One proposal
in particular, extending criminal jurisdiction to vessels or aircraft
owned by U.S. citizens or registered in the United States, would bring
the U.S. into compliance with the Trafficking in Persons Protocol to
the United Nations Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime.
These proposals are outlined below.
A. Anti-Money Laundering and Forfeiture Laws
The TOC Strategy recognizes that criminals who commit their crimes
overseas often launder and maintain their assets in the United States.
Accordingly, a focal point of the Strategy is the Proceeds of Crime Act
(POCA) a comprehensive money laundering and forfeiture proposal
designed to address gaps in our current legal authority. Money
laundering and forfeiture laws strike at the very core of transnational
criminal organizations by preventing them from using our financial
system to move and hide their money, and by depriving them of the
profit and capital needed to operate their enterprises.
POCA would update and clarify the current list of specified
unlawful activities that are predicates for money laundering to include
all domestic felonies except those specifically exempted, state
felonies and federal misdemeanors that are included in the existing
racketeering predicates, and any foreign crimes that would be felonies
in the United States. The changes sought would also increase the scope
and effect of anti-money laundering provisions in promotional money
laundering, bulk cash smuggling, tax evasion, and money laundering
through informal value transfer systems, and would clarify the
application of the law to commingled funds and aggregated transactions.
Finally, the proposal also extends wiretap authority for money
laundering offenses, and it extends the extraterritorial provision for
money laundering to non-United States citizens where their
extraterritorial acts in violation of 18 U.S.C. Sec. 1956 cause an
effect in the United States. These changes would fill in numerous gaps
and omissions in our decades-old anti-money laundering laws and improve
the ability to prosecute money launderers and to forfeit criminal
proceeds and facilitating property.
POCA also seeks to update our civil forfeiture capabilities. Civil
forfeiture is a particularly effective tool in this regard as it
enables prosecutors to forfeit the proceeds of crime even when criminal
prosecutions of those involved are not possible. Thus fugitives, drug
kingpins, and corrupt foreign officials not present in the United
States cannot elude the reach of our enforcement entirely.
POCA would enhance the government's civil forfeiture authority in a
number of important ways. It seeks to expand the scope of civil
forfeiture authority to include ``facilitating property,'' or property
that enables crime to occur, for all money laundering predicates and
broadens the categories of facilitating property that can be civilly
forfeited in connection to drug offenses and alien smuggling and
harboring. To better attack the financial infrastructures of these
organizations through more effective financial investigations, the
proposal provides increased civil forfeiture, administrative, and
foreign bank record subpoena authority. It also would enable the use of
classified information in civil forfeiture cases, which is critical in
going after transnational criminal organizations that threaten our
national security.
Taken together, the changes will make our investigations and
prosecutions against the financial operations of transnational
organized crime groups much more effective. By taking their money, we
take away these groups' reason to exist and ability to operate. We are
committed to working with Congress to combat the use of shell companies
to generate and move illicit money by requiring that those who form
entities in the United States disclose beneficial owner information.
B. Racketeering Provisions
Second, the Administration proposes to modernize our most powerful
anti-organized crime statutes: the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt
Organizations Act, or RICO, and the Violent Crimes in Aid of
Racketeering statute, or VICAR. The proposed amendments to the RICO
statute, 18 U.S.C. Sec. 1961, et seq., would clarify that RICO has
extraterritorial application in cases where criminal enterprises
operate at least in part in the United States, or where they commit any
predicate acts in the United States, or where the charged pattern
includes offenses that apply extraterritorially. Criminal organizations
have expanded their activities to increase their power, influence, and
wealth, availing themselves of new opportunities. The proposed
legislation, therefore, expands the list of racketeering predicate
crimes to include offenses that are prevalent in an increasingly
interconnected world and engaged in by transnational organized crime
groups, including economic espionage, computer fraud, aggravated
identity theft, violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, health
care fraud, illegal firearms trafficking, as well as a limited number
of violations of foreign law.
Specific to the issue of human trafficking, the proposed changes
expand the list of RICO predicates to include state crimes of peonage,
forced labor, slavery, and trafficking in persons, and adds section
1594, relating to attempts and conspiracies involving peonage, slavery,
and trafficking in persons.
These proposed changes are important to address a number of
recurring issues in organized crime prosecutions. In a number of
instances, the government has been unable to charge the members or
associates of a criminal enterprise with RICO because the underlying
criminal activities were not listed as predicates. The new predicates
are intended to fill these gaps. Amendments to the Violent Crimes in
Aid of Racketeering (VICAR) statute, 18 U.S.C. Sec. 1959, are also
recommended, including a provision which would provide for
extraterritorial application in certain situations such as when the
underlying statute criminalizing the violent act in question applies
extraterritorially or when any part of the violation occurs within the
jurisdiction of the United States.
C. Witness Protection
The Administration is also proposing legislation that fosters
international cooperation regarding the relocation of witnesses giving
testimony in criminal cases, and relatives and other persons close to
them. Relocation is sometimes the only way to protect the security of
such persons, and enhancing our ability to cooperate with foreign
governments in these situations will greatly improve our ability to
mount multinational operations against high-priority transnational
organized crime targets.
D. Extraterritorial Jurisdiction
The Administration proposes criminalizing conduct occurring on
vessels or aircraft owned by the United States or a United States
citizen, vessels registered under U.S. or state law, and aircraft
registered under United States law if such vessels or aircraft are
outside the jurisdiction of any particular state. In the absence of
such expanded jurisdiction, the United States would, for example, lack
federal jurisdiction over a sex-trafficking offense committed on board
a United States-registered vessel or aircraft located between two
foreign countries. Our proposal would bring the United States into full
compliance with the 2000 Transnational Organized Crime Convention, and
in particular the Trafficking in Persons Protocol.
E. Narcotics
The Administration proposes to expand conspiracy liability when
controlled substances are destined to the United States from a foreign
country. Under our proposal, members of any conspiracy to distribute
controlled substances will be subject to United States jurisdiction
when at least one member of the conspiracy intends or knows that the
drugs will be unlawfully imported into the United States. We are also
recommending changes to sentencing policy for violations of the
Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act. Such violations currently carry
statutory penalties of up to 30 years' imprisonment and/or fines up to
$5,000,000. Sentencing guidelines for these violations, however, do not
yet exist. The Administration is recommending a congressional directive
to the United States Sentencing Commission, proposed statutory
language, and a proposed sentencing guideline to yield a sentencing
range of 37-46 months for a first offender, absent adjustments or
departures.
V. CONCLUSION
Transnational organized crime and human trafficking present many
new challenges for United States law enforcement. The investigations
and prosecutions of transnational organized criminals groups are among
the most difficult and complex cases in the Department. Even as we
develop our cases and push the envelope of what our agents and
prosecutors have tried in the past, the criminals continue to evolve
rapidly, deploying new techniques and strategies to evade our nets and
continue their illegal activities. It is important to ensure that
federal agents and prosecutors are fully armed with the most
comprehensive and up to date legislative and investigative tools to
carry this fight across the globe and attack the criminals where they
live. Only in this way can we protect our citizens, corporations, and
property from those who would take them from us.
Prepared Statement of Piero Bonadeo, Deputy Representative to the
United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, New York
On behalf of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, my
sincere thanks to the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe
for inviting me to speak. The cooperative spirit of the Commission as
well as the one of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in
Europe (OSECE) has often supported the United Nations Office on Drugs
and Crime and the United Nations Global Initiative to Fight Humane
Trafficking.
Human trafficking is a truly global phenomenon and a crime which
affects nearly every part of the world, whether as a source, transit or
destination country. According to the (UNODC), victims from at least
127 countries have been identified, and it is estimated that more than
2.4 million people are being exploited by criminals at any given time.
More than a decade after the adoption of the Protocol to Prevent
Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and
Children, supplementing the United Nations Convention against
Transnational Organized Crime the largest majority of countries have
criminalized most forms of human trafficking in their legislation.
Nevertheless, the use of such laws to prosecute and convict traffickers
remains limited. In the 2009 Global Report on Trafficking in persons,
for instance, two out of every five countries covered in the report had
never recorded a single conviction for trafficking offenses.
The demand of trafficking victims, especially those related to
sexual exploitation, remains high, particularly in Europe. According to
the UNODC Organized Crime Threat Assessment, the majority of the
victims detected in Europe come from the Balkans and the former Soviet
Union, including countries such as Romania, Bulgaria, Ukraine, the
Russian Federation, and the Republic of Moldova.
With regard to the victims originated in South America, mostly
Brazil, they are being sent to destinations such as Spain, Italy,
Portugal, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.
African victims are mainly in West Africa, although North African
victims seem to be increasing. Finally, Asian victims are mainly
originated in Thailand. Most recently, Chinese, Vietnamese, and
Cambodian victims are increasing.
Traffickers remain using deception and coercion as their main
instruments to recruit victims. As a recent trend, women seem not to be
only involved in recruiting other women, but also playing the role of
guardians in the countries of destination of victims. Another trend is
that in the case of Europe, the perpetrators are frequently not
nationals of the country where they operate, but often nationals of the
same country as their victims.
The International Labour Organization estimated that the minimum
number of victims trafficked for all purposes in Europe and North
America was 279,000 in 2005. Considering this, UNODC estimated that the
number of trafficking victims in Europe would be around 140,000 if
about on victim in 20 were detected. Following this figure and assuming
that these victims could produce an estimate of 50 million sexual
services, at EUR 50 per client, the market would be worth approximately
US$3 billion.
Distinguished Commissioners, cooperation is fundamental to combat
the exploitation of women, children and men by human traffickers. Let
us start with the outcome of our own efforts to gather information from
Member States: trafficking in persons for forced labour is the second
most reported form of exploitation. But, we share with all of you a
concern that this form of trafficking is less frequently detected and
reported that trafficking in persons for sexual exploitation. Labour
trafficking, just until recently, was started to be taken into
consideration by the world community. Prosecution and criminalization
for this particular type of trafficking also needs to be set in
practice.
We must also challenge the lack of visibility of trafficking in
persons for forced labour. Too often, forced labour is hidden from
public view. This may happen because the instances in which labour
trafficking occurs, may not bring a direct physical r psychological
damage to the person. A victim of labour trafficking can be someone who
is made to work long shifts, being paid less than what was promised in
their contracts, or with less or no benefits than the ones migrant
workers are usually entitled to. Victims are often convinced by their
foreign employers that those are the conditions they are legally
entitled to, being deceived by them. Therefore, they do not often
report this situation, unless their working conditions become
unbearable.
UNODC is helping to shine a powerful light on this crime. Working
with others in particular the Organization for Security and Cooperation
in Europe (OSCE), we are developing clear strategies to meet government
and civil society concerns.
In doing so, UNODC brings a unique criminal justice approach. As
the guardian of the United Nations Convention against Transnational
Organized Crime, we have a ready made legal framework for international
cooperation and the prevention of human trafficking. Thanks to the
convention, through cooperation, police no longer have to stop at
frontiers, while criminals cross them freely.
We should also not forget how human trafficking is related to
instability. When social and political upheaval exists, as in North
Africa at present, our work is even more important in such turbulent
and disordered regions.
If we are able to address human trafficking in these conditions,
development and security are fundamental. For this reason, we should
join forces and integrate our efforts into the wider agenda of
multilateralism on development and stability. In this context UNODC is
working with the policy committee to mainstream transnational organized
crime into the wider agenda of the UN.
Trafficking in human beings is one of the most lucrative forms of
organized crime, estimated to generated 32 billion US dollar in gross
proceeds each year. Criminal assets arising from this grave violation
of human rights and fundamental freedoms may be invested in legitimate
and criminal activities, challenging economic security, fueling
corruption and undermining the rule of law.
OSCE and UNODC have joint their forces for leveraging their efforts
to fight human trafficking through clamping down on money laundering.
In the framework of the Alliance against Trafficking in Persons OSCE,
participating States and Partners for Cooperation are harmonizing their
actions and using the same decision-making aids. UNODC wholeheartedly
endorses this approach and is proud to have joined the Alliance.
An added issue behind the legal aspects of human trafficking is a
lack of knowledge and understanding at the global level. In those cases
in which prosecutions have been undertaken, very little is currently
known about them internationally. This often leaves open questions as
to how practitioners use the respective laws and what, if any, the
characteristics of successful prosecutions are.
In a bid to answer these questions, UNODC has developed a database
of Human Trafficking case law to provide immediate, public access to
officially documented instances of this crime. The database contains
details on the nationalities of victims and perpetrators, trafficking
routes, verdicts and other information related to prosecuted cases
around the world. As such, it provides not only statistics on the
number of prosecutions and convictions, but also the real-life stories
of trafficked persons as documented by the courts.
The database is aimed at assisting judges, prosecutors,
policymakers, media researchers and other interested parties by making
available details of real cases with examples of how the respective
national laws in the place can be used to prosecute human trafficking.
At the time of the launch of the database, more than 150 selected
cases from over 30 countries and two regional courts had been uploaded,
with an additional 100 cases from over a dozen states to be added in
the coming months.
A little over a year ago the General Assembly passed by consensus
the UN Global Plan of Action to Combat Trafficking in Persons. Promoted
universal ratification of the United Nations Convention against
Transnational Organized Crime and the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and
Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children, as well
as other relevant international instruments that address trafficking in
persons, and reinforced the implementation of existing instruments
against trafficking in persons and building on the relevant sub
regional, regional and cross-regional mechanisms and initiatives.
In particular, Article 32 of the plan calls upon member states to
Provide assistance and services for the physical psychological and
social recovery and rehabilitation of trafficked persons.
An important operationalization of the Global plan of action, and
another mechanism promoting the right to an effective remedy for
victims of trafficking is the ``UN Voluntary Trust Fund for Victims of
Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children'' launched last
November pursuant to Article 38 of the global plan of action. The fund
managed by UNODC, provides humanitarian, legal and financial aid
victims of the trafficking in persons through established channels of
assistance, such as governments, Non Governmental Organizations and
International Organizations.
The Fund operates with the advice of a five member board of
trustees appointed by the Secretary General. Last week, the Fund
released its first trances of funding for frontline organizations
working with trafficking survivors, with close to $300,000 being
disbursed under a Small Grants Facility to organizations that are at
the forefront of providing services to victims.
The 12 selected projects for the first year of the Small Grants
Facility cover all major regions of the world. Funded projects are set
to be rolled out in Albania, Cambodia, Costa Rica, the Czech Republic,
France, India, Israel, Kenya, Nepal, Nigeria, Moldova and the US.
With projects running from ten months to three years, the funding
assists in several areas, with the ultimate aim of empowering
trafficking victims to regain their lives. These services include legal
support to allow victims to seek justice against those who enslave
them; facilities to register their identities and to return home; and
much needed counselling, training and support to ensure they are in a
position to rebuild their lives.
To date about 1 million dollars has been pledged to this trust
fund.
The realization of the right to an effective remedy hinges upon a
variety of interrelated factors. Accurate identification of trafficked
persons is a pre-requisite for trafficked persons to be able to
exercise the right to an effective remedy. More prosecution is needed
not only to remove offenders from further criminality, but to also
allow for the confiscation of assets so that such resources can be
enforcers in identifying, tracing, freezing and confiscating assets, as
well as drafting legislation to allow such assets to be used for
compensation, is therefore also key to an effective right to a remedy.
And pursuant to article 60 of the Global Plan of Action, in late
2012 UNODC will issue its first biennial report on patterns and flows
of trafficking in persons at the national, regional and international
levels in comprehensive manner, sharing best practices and lessons
learned from various initiatives and mechanisms. This strengthening of
information collection and reporting is also part of a comprehensive
and holistic response aimed at the right to an effective remedy.
Distinguished Commissioners, Sixty three years ago, the General
Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In doing so
they proclaimed that all humans are born free, that no one shall be
held in slavery or servitude, and that slavery and the slave shall be
prohibited in all their forms.
Yet today, millions of people, the majority of them children and
women, are victims of human modern day slavery. As we go about our work
to end this scourge, may we be guided by the wisdom of the survivors as
to what type of redress is most meaningful, and to be able to find
creative ways to make this happen. We have come very far in the past 10
years; thanks to the support of MS and civil society we have an
important protocol, and a promising global plan, as well as increased
awareness. However, the traffickers are a clever and adaptable bunch -
- in the end it is a battle of the wills: theirs or ours. Until we
seriously address the root causes of trafficking such as [art 9]
poverty, underdevelopment and lack of equal opportunity, traffickers
will always have the upper hand.
Thank you.
Prepared Statement of Ms. Martina E. Vandenberg, Pro Bono Counsel, The
Freedom Network USA
Chairman Smith, Chairman Cardin, and Helsinki Commission Members,
Thank you for inviting me to testify before you today. It is an
honor to have this opportunity to speak to you about the problem of
human trafficking and transnational organized crime. I would
particularly like to thank Congressman Smith for his dedication to the
fight against all forms of human trafficking, including trafficking for
forced labor and involuntary servitude.
Over the years, under Chairman Smith's leadership, the Helsinki
Commission has steadfastly fought to ensure that we never lose sight of
the victims of human trafficking. It is that perspective that I hope to
bring to your attention this morning.
I serve as pro bono counsel to the Freedom Network (USA), a
coalition of thirty-one nongovernmental organizations and individuals
providing services to--and advocating for the rights of--trafficking
survivors in the United States. The Freedom Network was founded in
2001, immediately following the enactment of the Trafficking Victims
Protection Act of 2000 (TVPA). Our members have served the majority of
individuals certified by the Department of Health and Human Services
(HHS) as victims of a severe form of trafficking in persons. We use a
rights-based framework in providing those services. The Freedom
Network's advocacy draws directly from the experiences of trafficking
survivors we have worked with in the field.
Organized crime brings to mind stereotypical gangsters, heavily
armed and laden with cash. Human trafficking certainly encompasses
traditional organized crime. But more often, human trafficking is
conducted by ``disorganized crime:'' small groups operating
independently. The United Nations Convention Against Transnational
Organized Crime defines an ``organized criminal group'' as a
``structured group of three or more persons, existing for a period of
time and acting in concert with the aim of committing one or more
serious crimes or offences..'' Using this definition, consider the
following cases:
Mondragon: In 2006, Oscar Mondragon pleaded guilty to
conspiring with his two brothers to lure young women from Central
America to the United States with promises of good jobs. When the women
arrived, Mondragon and his co-conspirators held the women in forced
labor in Houston-area bars and cantinas selling high-priced drinks to
male customers.
Carreto: In 2008, a diminutive grandmother pled guilty to
sex trafficking for her role in a family-run gang based in Tenancingo,
Mexico. According to the indictment, two of Ms. Carreto's sons and an
associate used ``physical violence, sexual assault, threats of harm,
deception, false promises and coercion'' to force the women into
prostitution in the United States.
Calimlim: Two physicians in Wisconsin were convicted in
2006 of trafficking a young woman and holding her in their home for
nineteen years as a domestic servant. The physicians threatened the
victim with deportation and imprisonment if she disobeyed their orders.
After the criminal convictions, pro bono attorneys filed a civil
Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) action
against the physicians and their three adult children.
Askarkhodjaev: Askarkhodjaev: An Uzbek citizen,
Abrorkhodja Askarkhodjaev, was sentenced to 12 years in prison in the
first forced labor trafficking case charged as part of a criminal RICO
conspiracy. Akarkhodjaev and his co-conspirators trafficked foreign
laborers holding various visa statuses into the United States through
three corporations for forced labor in hotels. According to the 90-page
indictment, the traffickers charged their victims between $3,000 to
$5,000 to obtain temporary employment visas known as H-2Bs. The victims
and their families borrowed heavily to pay these fees.
As these examples illustrate, this is organized crime 2.0. It is
global. It preys on the vulnerability of migrants seeking a better life
in the United States. In many cases, it relies on labor recruiters and
middlemen to bring victims into the United States legally. It can be
violent, but is not necessarily so. Debt bondage and threats of
deportation are often enough to immobilize victims. But there is one
feature the traditional gangsters and the new organized criminals
share: they are laden with cash.
In the words of Florrie Burke, a Freedom Network leader and one of
the leading experts on human trafficking in the United States, ``We are
seeing more family-run operations and small-criminal networks. It is
not the old definition of organized crime. But it is just as
dangerous.''
With these cases in mind, I'd like to focus on three main areas:
1. The need for victim and witness protection;
2. The role of corruption in human trafficking; and
3. The role of restitution in the fight against human
trafficking.
At the end of my remarks, I will suggest some recommendations and
remedies that may help in our joint mission: the eradication of human
trafficking.
Victim and Witness Protection
In the United States, and throughout the OSCE region, victims look
to non-governmental organizations and civil society for support.
Trafficked men, women, and children arrive on the Freedom Network
members' doorsteps in very different ways. Some escape from their
traffickers and find the NGOs. Others are identified in raids by law
enforcement and referred to service providers. Still others find help
through Good Samaritans or faith-based communities. But no matter how
they find these organizations, the victims have several things in
common. First, they are highly traumatized. Second, they are utterly
terrified. And third, they are concerned about family members,
particularly children, back in their country of origin.
The Freedom Network has advocated forcefully over the past eight
months for improvements in protections for victims of human
trafficking. The key building block for protection in the United States
is continued presence, a temporary form of immigration relief available
only through federal law enforcement. Continued presence (CP) permits
victims of trafficking to remain in the United States during a criminal
investigation, without fear of deportation. CP also allows the victims
to obtain a work permit and minimal benefits. The concept, embedded in
the TVPA, is that victims able to stabilize their lives and their
status will be able to cooperate in a criminal investigation.
But the numbers of victims receiving continued presence has
plummeted. According to the State Department Trafficking in Persons
Report for June 2011, 299 victims received this very basic form of
protection in 2009. In 2010, only 186 did.
The failure to protect victims of human trafficking--in part so
that they may serve as witnesses in criminal cases against their
traffickers--is one explanation for the abysmally low number of
prosecutions in the United States and around the world.
How low is that number? In 2010, there were just 103 federal
prosecutions of 181 defendants, with 141 convictions in the United
States. In the entire world, there were just 6,017 prosecutions and
3,619 convictions. And in Europe, there were 2,803 prosecutions,
resulting in just 1,850 convictions.
Victims who do not feel safe will not come forward to testify
against their traffickers. Victims with family members remaining in the
country of origin, particularly children, are often too terrified to
cooperate. In some forced labor cases, relatives may work for the
traffickers back in the home country, placing them at risk. In the
Carreto case, the forced prostitution case highlighted above, the
traffickers held the victims' children hostage back in Mexico.
According to Suzanne Tomatore, an attorney and co-chair of the Freedom
Network, Russian traffickers operating in New York routinely terrified
their victims by bragging about links to organized crime back in
Russia. Family members at home would not be safe unless the victims
continued working in strip clubs, surrendering all of their earnings.
These cases speak poignantly to the need to protect not just the
victims in the United States, but also their family members abroad.
Family members should be paroled into the United States. The categories
for derivative status--that is family members of victims receiving T-
derivative visas--should be expanded. And prosecutors in U.S. Attorneys
offices need additional training. The AUSAs must not only understand
human trafficking, they must also appreciate the risks that victims
take in coming forward. In a recent case, an Assistant U.S. Attorney
responded to a victim who had expressed fear of her trafficker. The
AUSA told the victim, who spoke only limited English, that she should
``Call 911.'' Victims must be treated with sensitivity and care by law
enforcement. Only then will we see victims willing to come forward to
prosecute the perpetrators.
Corruption and Human Trafficking
Corruption is fundamental to traffickers' success. I have testified
before the Commission in the past about concrete cases of corruption I
documented in post-conflict Bosnia & Herzegovina. There, as reported in
the Human Rights Watch publication, Hopes Betrayed: Trafficking of
Women and Girls to Post-Conflict Bosnia & Herzegovina for Forced
Prostitution, corrupt police officers participated directly in
trafficking. Some local police officers moonlighted as guards in
brothels holding trafficked women and girls from the former Soviet
Union. Traffickers provided pay-offs to local police in the form of
cash and free sexual services in exchange for protection from raids.
At every step along the trafficking chain, there is an opportunity
for bribery. In one case reported by La Strada, a well-respected anti-
trafficking network in the OSCE region, a trafficker transported women
by train across a border within the former Soviet Union. The trafficker
held the passports for all of his victims, paying a customs agent a
bribe for each woman traveling without a passport.
Does corruption matter in the United States? True, we do have the
rule of law. Corruption is far less prevalent than in many other OSCE
countries. But it is not non-existent. Take, for example, the case of
an ICE agent from Florida. He pled guilty to soliciting kickbacks from
a confidential informant working on a trafficking investigation. The
ICE agent also demanded and received $12,000 from an individual in
Ecuador smuggling migrants into the United States. In 2006, federal
authorities indicted two NYPD officers for accepting bribes from
traffickers operating a string of brothels on the Eastern seaboard. The
traffickers, who forced women from Korea into prostitution, paid an
undercover detective investigating these crimes more than $125,000 in
cash.
Corruption and organized crime have a symbiotic relationship. But
corruption is one of the most under-reported elements of human
trafficking. And for victims, one of the most fundamental.
Whether the bribes occur here or abroad, corruption plays a
fundamental role in the lives of trafficking victims in the United
States. It is the backdrop. Many of the trafficking victims the Freedom
Network members have encountered over the years come from countries
where corruption is rampant. These victims bring an expectation of
corruption. They believe that the police have been bribed. Many are
convinced that the judge can be bought. Their traffickers have told
them time and time again that once captured by U.S. law enforcement,
they will be detained, prosecuted, and deported. For many of our
clients, a ``rescue'' by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)
agents is not a rescue. It is the culmination of all the horror stories
told by traffickers. It is - in the victims' eyes - an arrest. Victims
from countries where justice is bought and sold see little hope for
escape. And the traffickers stoke and exploit these fears. Corruption
silences victims. It guarantees impunity.
Restitution and Human Trafficking
Under U.S. law, restitution for trafficking victims is mandatory.
18 U.S.C. Sec. 1593. That is the law. The reality looks quite
different. In the experience of the Freedom Network members,
restitution orders are almost never collected. In some cases, the
seized assets go to government coffers. In other cases, the U.S.
Attorney's Office does not follow up on the restitution order
aggressively. Restitution orders must be enforced. In the first
instance, it is the federal government's responsibility to do so.
Why does restitution matter? First, seizing criminals' assets
deters crime. Trafficking is lucrative. Enforced restitution orders
render it slightly less so. Second, trafficking victims are owed these
funds. Restitution orders cover back wages and earnings stolen from
them.
There is an enormous difference in the lives of trafficking
survivors who receive their restitution orders and those who do not.
Those who do can move out of economic crisis and secure a toe hold into
normal life. Those who do not often continue to struggle, trapped in
low wage jobs and exploited by unscrupulous employers.
Mandatory restitution offers the promise that victims can move on
with their lives. But mandatory restitution is broken in the United
States. Several years ago, Senator Durbin sent questions to the
Department of Justice requesting data on the amount of restitution
collected for victims, compared to the amount of restitution ordered.
The Department of Justice responded that the government did not track
these statistics. That is a mistake. Prosecutors should be trained: a
case does not end with a criminal conviction. It ends with payment in
full of the criminal restitution order. The Department of Justice
should track the amounts of restitution collected and incorporate this
into the performance evaluation metrics for federal prosecutors.
But that is not enough. The small number of victims who do receive
restitution checks are horrified to learn that their back wages and
restitution payments are taxable as federal income tax in the year
received. That means that a victim who collects ten years' worth of
salary in one year will have to pay taxes in the highest income tax
bracket. It is the traffickers - not the victims - who have committed
tax fraud and evasion. Just as the Feds nailed Al Capone on tax
evasion, traffickers should be forced to pay these taxes. Restitution
orders must be increased to cover the taxes. Alternatively, trafficking
victims should be given a tax waiver, much like that provided to
Holocaust survivors who recover for crimes committed against them
during World War II.
Restitution orders serve another purpose. With assets, trafficking
victims can bring their family members to the United States. They can
afford safe housing and transportation. And they can relocate for their
own protection. There is no higher use for organized crime's ill-gotten
gains.
Recommendations:
1.Increase the use of continued presence to protect victims of
human trafficking;
2.Parole relatives of trafficking victims into the United
States to permit victims to cooperate with law enforcement
fully - and without fear of retaliation against family members
in the country of origin;
3.Increase the categories available for T-derivative visa
status to permit trafficking victims to relocate close family
members to the United States;
4.Ensure that trafficking victims are not held in immigration
detention;
5.Improve the Department of Homeland Security's efforts to
screen individuals to identify trafficking victims;
6.Increase the attention in the State Department's Trafficking
in Persons Report to the role of corruption in human
trafficking. This should include trafficking by state
officials, with a particular focus on diplomats trafficking
domestic workers for forced labor;
7.Train law enforcement authorities in the United States: 1) to
anticipate trafficking victims' unwillingness to cooperate
after a ``rescue''; and 2) to understand the role of corruption
in countries of origin;
8.Include fraud in foreign labor contracting as a RICO
predicate act;
9.Train prosecutors to engage in enforcement of restitution
orders;
10.Reward prosecutors for cases where restitution orders are
paid through positive performance review metrics;
11.Make restitution orders tax-free in the United States; and
12.Request a Government Accountability Office study on
collection of criminal restitution orders in human trafficking
cases.
These recommendations return our focus to where it should be: on
the human rights of trafficking victims. Again, I thank you for this
opportunity to speak with you. I would be happy to answer any
questions.
[all]
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