Human Trafficking in Sierra Leone - Protection

Protection

The Sierra Leonean government demonstrated limited efforts to protect trafficking victims during the last year. The government does not operate its own shelter, but refers victims to the nation’s only trafficking victim shelter, which is located in Freetown and operated by IOM. The Family Support Units (FSU) of the Sierra Leone Police (SLP) turned over intercepted trafficking victims to the Ministry of Social Welfare (MOSW), which then referred the victims to IOM for assistance. Some victims outside Freetown were not referred for care, however, due to lack of transport to the capital or the difficulty of travel during the rainy season. The government reported that it referred 14 trafficking victims to IOM for assistance in the 2007 calendar year. In January 2007, the Sierra Leonean Embassy in Conakry received from the Guinean government and protected 10 suspected child trafficking victims and returned them to Sierra Leone. The MOSW and IOM determined that the children were in fact not trafficking victims, but were related to the aforementioned four Sierra Leonean women whom Guinean authorities had suspected were trafficking these children into Sierra Leone. The children were reunited with their parents under the supervision of the MOSW.

In March 2008, the government donated shelter space to IOM in order to replace the facility IOM currently rents. Although the government permits victims to participate in investigations and prosecutions, cases take so long to go to court that many victims are no longer available at the time of trial. As a result, some cases are dropped, since many cannot be successfully tried without a victim witness. The government does not actively encourage victims to participate in investigations and prosecutions. Sierra Leone does not provide legal alternatives to the removal of foreign victims to countries where they face hardship or retribution. There were no known cases during the year of trafficking victims inappropriately incarcerated or fined for unlawful acts as a direct result of being trafficked. However, authorities’ conflation of trafficking and smuggling has probably led to some trafficking victims being penalized as illegal immigrants. Also, NGOs report that police raid brothels and arrest females engaged in prostitution without following procedures to identify trafficking victims among them.