Protection
The Lao government demonstrated progress in improving protection for victims of trafficking during the year. The Ministry of Labor and Social Welfare (MLSW) and Immigration Department cooperated with IOM, UNIAP, and a local NGO to provide victim assistance. The MLSW continued operating a small transit center in Vientiane. Victims not wanting to return home are referred to a long-term shelter run by the Lao Women’s Union or to a local NGO. Over the last year, 280 formally identified victims of cross border trafficking were repatriated to Laos from Thailand and an additional 21 were repatriated in 2008. Approximately 100 victims are currently residing in rehabilitation centers in Thailand. The Lao government provided medical services, counseling, vocational training, and employment services for victims in its transit shelter in Vientiane and at the Lao Women’s Union shelter. The government actively encouraged victims to participate in investigations and prosecutions of traffickers. As of January 2007, the Lao government stopped requiring exit permits for citizens to travel abroad, which eliminated the potential for penalizing illegal migrants and trafficking victims, through fines, upon their return. Government instructions against fining, and the removal of the legal basis for those fines, effectively reduced financial penalties faced by victims. The government provided land to an NGO for a new shelter and transit center for trafficking victims in Savannakhet in 2007 and it continued to provide office space and staff to assist IOM’s programs.
Read more about this topic: Human Trafficking In Laos
Famous quotes containing the word protection:
“We all cry out that the world is corrupt,—and I fear too justly,—but we never reflect, what we have to thank for it, and that it is our open countenance of vice, which gives the lye to our private censures of it, which is its chief protection and encouragement.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
“Without infringing on the liberty we so much boast, might we not ask our professional Mayor to call upon the smokers, have them register their names in each ward, and then appoint certain thoroughfares in the city for their use, that those who feel no need of this envelopment of curling vapor, to insure protection may be relieved from a nuisance as disgusting to the olfactories as it is prejudicial to the lungs.”
—Harriot K. Hunt (1805–1875)
“No: until I want the protection of Massachusetts to be extended to me in some distant Southern port, where my liberty is endangered, or until I am bent solely on building up an estate at home by peaceful enterprise, I can afford to refuse allegiance to Massachusetts, and her right to my property and life. It costs me less in every sense to incur the penalty of disobedience to the State than it would to obey. I should feel as if I were worth less in that case.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)