By Constance Meju
The African Centre for leadership Strategy and Development, CSD, a non-profit, non-governmental organization in Nigeria has joined organizations and people across the world to amplify voices calling for an end to the trafficking of persons the world over.
As the world marked the day Against Trafficking in Persons on Wednesday, July 31, the leadership center called on governments especially the Nigerian government to work to reunite trafficked persons with their families.
In a press release marking the day signed by M Nyong Essien on behalf of the Center in Abuja, it descried trafficking in persons as an act of gross violation of rights recognized by the UN, the Nigerian Constitution and other international instruments and the number three crime in Nigeria.
Part of the message read:
“trafficking in persons, an act where persons are recruited, transported, transferred and received through use of force, threat or other forms of coercion, abduction, fraud or deception, through the abuse of power or giving and receiving of payments, is against Section 34 of the 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria and the United Nations Protocol to prevent, suppress and punish trafficking in persons and the protocol against the smuggling of migrants by air, land and sea, both protocols adopted in year 2000 and brought into force in 2003, which supplement the United Nations Convention Against Transactional Organized Crime (UNTOC). The Palermo Declaration, a protocol certified by Nigerian in 2005 criminalizes this act.
“Statistics from the global slavery index show that 40.3million persons are trafficked worldwide with India, China and Pakistan top across the world with 71 percent of trafficked persons being women and girls and 25 per cent being children.
“Nigerians according to the US Deportees Trafficking report (2019) ranks 32 out of 162 countries with the highest number of slaves and has been upgraded to a Tier 2 country on the slavery index. The National Agency for Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons, NAPTIP, an agency under the responsibility of preventing the trafficking of persons and all forms of human degrades in Nigeria, places the average age of persons being trafficked at 15 years with 75 percent of them being trafficked locally across states and 23 percent within the state with just two percent outside the country.
“Human trafficking is the third most common crime in the country according to UNESCO (2016) and the most trafficked persons are children and women who are deprived of education, decent forms of livelihood, used for forced labour and most at times, forced into prostitution.
‘‘The LSD Centre calls on the government to address the menace by making provisions to reunite trafficked persons with their families and adequately re-integrated them into society”.
#Gender and Accountability
#Kebetkache Women
*Constance Meju is publisher of Port Harcourt based National Point Newspaper and committed gender equity, children, human right and environmental justice advocate.
