THE NEW LAW 3907/2011

The anti-trafficking policy  has been a debatable issue. On the one hand the states  adopt strict legislations in the securitization of the borders and on the other hand they try to harmonize the  human rights law related to the protection for the vulnerable groups of people. According to the law  the victims of human trafficking belong to the vulnerable groups of people. The legal protection provides first, medical and psychological aid and support and second  a short term residence for humanitarian reasons. The problem occurs after the expire of this short term residence permission. The new Greek law 3907/2011 revised the article 44 of the previous law 3386/2005 in changing the preconditions for the renewal of the residence permission for the victims of human trafficking.

  In Greece the  Migrant Law of 3386/2005 in article1 defines as victim of human trafficking  the person which  became victim of the criminal acts provided in the penal law.    The law 3386/2005 provided a  short term residence permission to the  victims of human trafficking with the presuppose that the victims will cooperate with state authorities. The new law 3907/2011 which will come into force in 2012,  provides the victims with an annual permission of residence for humanitarian reasons. The revised article 44 (article 42 in 3907/2011) explicitly refers to the victims of human trafficking which they  don’t cooperate with state authorities. However, the main requirement for the renewal of the residence permission is the investigation and the judicial procedure over their case. If the penal procedure comes to an end then it is really difficult for the victims of human trafficking to renew their residence in the host country. As a result the end of the judicial investigation means in fact deportation. Therefore, the human trafficking victims are being victimized twice. This   precondition for rendering the residence permission for another two years is still problematic  considering that the penal procedure in one way or another needs the witness and in fact the cooperation of the victims. Considering that the victims usually are afraid to turn in their pimps or due to psychological reasons, they deny to cooperate, this legal mechanism of protection is likely to fail.

  As  a result the victims are being trapped in a legal impasse which on the one hand provides borders securitization and on the other hand declares the protection of human rights.  By taking away any possibility for the victims to settle in a country and take control of their life, they are calling to choose between deportation and prolonged victimization.

BAD ROMANCE…

  Lady Gaga in 2009 released her successful album “The Fame Monster”. Her song BAD ROMANCE , written by  the same  and produced by RedOne, was a  track  inspired by Lady  Gaga experienced while touring the globe from 2008 to 2009. After a demo version of the song was leaked, Gaga premiered the finished version at Alexander McQueen's show at the Paris Fashion Week in 2009. The song has sold 9.7 million copies worldwide in 2010. It  was  also ranked the ninth best song by Rolling Stone in their list of "25 Best Songs of 2009" and received the Grammy Award for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance.

 The music video features Gaga inside a surreal, futuristic, white bathhouse where she  gets kidnapped by a group of models who drug her and sell her to the mafia  for sexual slavery. The music video ends with Gaga killing the man who bought her. The video and the lyrics of the song are deeply symbolic. It is a video based on gender stereotypes of the 21^st century. The plot of the video touches all the aspects of the contemporary thesis of women in a materialistic society.   

  The video clip was nominated for ten awards at the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards, winning seven of those, including the Video of the Year and  also won a Grammy for Best Short Form Music Video.  

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrO4YZeyl0I

“The street children of Romania”

After the collapse of communism in Romania, the country fall in great economic devastation and a huge number of abandoned young boys and girls started beg on the streets of Bucharest. The street children of Romania became also the children of the sewers. Having no place to stay they used the tunnels of the sewers as a home while  sniffing glue from plastic bags  was the escape  from hunger. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/3665646.stm

  Since 2007 and  the accession of Romania in the EU things have been better although poverty and marginalization is still a problem.  Despite the fact that the issue of the Romanian street children assembled the attention of many NGO’s and other humanitarian organizations,  the problem still remains. According to the Romanian Law the sexual abuse of children  is punished with prison sentences of up to fifteen years. Romania ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in October 1990, and in January 2002 it ratified the optional protocol on child trafficking, child prostitution, and child pornography.

   The Romanian reporter Liviu  Tipurita in 2003 made a documentary over this issue.   A Channel Four television documentary, “Cutting Edge: The Child Sex Trade,” refers to child sexual exploitation of children in Romania. In Bucharest, the reporter meets up with 15-year-old Laurentiu, who has lived on the streets for most of his life.  Laurentiu and his friends live on the streets. Every one of them has their own story. Of the little money they earn, mainly from begging and selling sex, much is spent fuelling their addiction to sniffing glue.

    The documentary exposed how Western pedophiles were coming to Romania posing as tourists, and were then procuring boys for underage sex.  The reporter follows up stories of  trafficked children  to Italy, and on the streets of Milan films a fourteen year old boy being pimped by his own father. Over weeks of investigation, several more cases of families selling their own children for sex are documented. ( See the documentary)  http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/cutting-edge-the-child-sex-trade/

HHUMAN TRAFFICKING DURING THE MIDDLE AGES IN THE BLACK SEA

  I was surprised reading Charles King book referring to the white slavery in the middle ages in the Black Sea.  Charles King writes: “…The Black Death had caused a severe labor shortage in Europe , and merchants were eager to meet the demand for household servants and agricultural laborers. Although the enslavement of the Christian was frowned upon by the Pope, Catholic merchants were given license to buy their fellow Christians as a way to of preventing their falling into the hands of the infidel Muslims…Slaves were by far the most significant single source of revenue on the Black Sea littoral. The average sale  price was between twenty and forty gold pieces, enough for the living expenses of an adult for two or three years.  From 1500 to 1650 the annual slave population trafficked via the Black Sea from Poland, the Russian lands, and the Caucasus probably reached over 10.000 people per year…” (C. King, Black Sea, A history, 116-117, 2004).

  Human trade  was not something new in the middle ages. Since antiquity slave trade was the most prosperous business in the Black Sea region.  Greek merchants bought indigenous Scythians and they transferred them to  Athens where they became domestic servants.  In the middle ages, the city of Gaffa in Crimea, under the rule of Genoese was the main supplier of slaves to Europe.  At that time inside the European elite, owing slaves was a matter of   social status and prestige. On the other hand, during the Ottoman Empire many Christians were sold as slaves, either for domestic servitude or, concerning women, as wives in the harems of the wealthy. It is worth mentioning that there was a willingness by some potentials slaves and by their families, to be sold, hoping that they were going to find a wealthy patron.  Another kind of human trade was the recruitment of the Christians minors in the military Ottoman groups, known as Janissaries. The boys were converted to Muslims and constituted the army of the Sultan. Opposite to the European perception, the Ottoman law did not recognized slavery as hereditary status and thus every slave could buy his freedom.

CHILD TRAFFICKING

  The Convention of the Rights of the Child and the Protocol of the Palermo  define as child  any person under the 18 years of age.   ILO and UNICEF   estimate that 1.2 million of children being trafficked every year while  the biggest percentage of children labor is placed in Africa, Central Asia and South America.   Children   belong to the most vulnerable groups for sexual exploitation and forced cheap labor.  Children from Eastern Europe, Africa and Middle East are being trafficked in order to work as domestic servants or in sweatshops, even as drug runners, while others  are forced into prostitution.. Trafficking of children also contains different ways of exploitation as   removal of organs and  recruitment as child soldiers. http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=29907&Cr=trafficking&Cr1=

 According to the website of Human Rights Watch in  July 2007:  “In over twenty countries around the world, children are direct participants in war. It is estimated that  200,000 to 300,000 children are serving as soldiers for both rebel groups and government forces in current armed conflicts". According to the United Nations in Somalia there is a dominant trend of recruitment of young children by the armed groups. Recruitment of children it is also reported in Middle East were the boys are used as bombers and martyrs or being trained to use weapons by the Taliban’s and by the Palestinian militant group.  http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=36698&Cr=Somali&Cr1

  Another important aspect of child trafficking is illegal adoptions. A distinctive example is that of children in Haiti.  Haitian children who lost their parents in the devastating earthquake in 2010 were being rescued and placed for adoption or sold to people who had no legal rights to the children. Many of the children are believed to have been sold for the purpose of organ trafficking and other exploitative purposes. During that time 10 American missionaries from a Baptist Church were arrested on the borders while they tried to smuggle 30 young children from Haiti into the Dominican Republic  (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8491981.stm).

  On the other hand globalization encourages the tourism for organ transplantation. The black market trade of human organs is sustained by wealthy individuals, sometimes on long waiting lists for transplants, traveling to foreign countries for the procedure .Organized crime has  children in its sights, because a large number of children also require donated organs and children’s organs can also be transplanted into adults.  In 2007 it was produced a Russian film, “YARIK”, focusing on the merging problem of children abduction for organ transplantation in Russia (see the trailer)  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umCWHWjJO6g