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:
“Innocence does not find near so much protection as guilt.”
—François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680)
“If one really wishes to know how justice is administered in a country, one does not question the policemen, the lawyers, the judges, or the protected members of the middle class. One goes to the unprotected—those, precisely, who need the laws’s protection most!—and listens to their testimony.”
—James Baldwin (1924–1987)
“Men speak of natural rights, but I challenge any one to show where in nature any rights existed or were recognized until there was established for their declaration and protection a duly promulgated body of corresponding laws.”
—Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933)