Protection
The Togolese government demonstrated modest efforts to protect trafficking victims over the last year. Togolese law enforcement officials regularly referred trafficking victims to government authorities or NGOs for care. The Ministry of Social Affairs, the Ministry of Child Protection, and The National Committee for the Reception and Reinsertion of Trafficked Children assisted victims primarily by alerting two NGOs in Lomé that provide immediate victim care, and by working with these organizations to return victims to their home communities. In 2007, however, the Minister of Child Protection also established a vocational training center for destitute children where the government has placed some trafficking victims before returning them to their families. The government reported that it referred 224 trafficking victims to one NGO in Lomé during the year and that 56 Togolese victims trafficked abroad were intercepted and repatriated in 2007. Neither the government nor NGOs provide any care for male victims older than 15 years. The government sometimes encourages victims to assist in trafficking investigations or prosecutions on an ad hoc basis. The government does not provide legal alternatives to the removal of foreign victims to countries where they face hardship or retribution; however the majority of victims are Togolese. Victims are not inappropriately incarcerated or fined for unlawful acts as a direct result of being trafficked.
Read more about this topic: Human Trafficking In Togo
Famous quotes containing the word protection:
“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)
“Is a Bill of Rights a security for [religious liberty]? If there were but one sect in America, a Bill of Rights would be a small protection for liberty.... Freedom derives from a multiplicity of sects, which pervade America, and which is the best and only security for religious liberty in any society. For where there is such a variety of sects, there cannot be a majority of any one sect to oppress and persecute the rest.”
—James Madison (1751–1836)
“Ah! how much a mother learns from her child! The constant protection of a helpless being forces us to so strict an alliance with virtue, that a woman never shows to full advantage except as a mother. Then alone can her character expand in the fulfillment of all life’s duties and the enjoyment of all its pleasures.”
—Honoré De Balzac (1799–1850)