NEW DELHI: Union Minister of State for Commerce Jairam Ramesh on Thursday warned carpet manufacturers against using child labour which could lead to a ban on exports to the United States and other Western nations.

He said the U.S. government might be thinking of publicly listing handmade carpets as products of child labour following a law passed by Congress last year.

On October 1, the U.S. Department of Labour issued a notice seeking comments on “procedural guidelines” for preparing a public list of goods produced by child and forced labour in violation of international standards. This action is in response to the law that asks the U.S government to carry out “additional activities to monitor and combat forced labour and child labour in foreign countries.” Mr. Ramesh said, “The government and industry will have to work together to deal effectively with this new development, which could be used by groups hostile to our interests.” He asked the Carpet Export Promotion Council to carry out an independent social audit every year to convince non-governmental organisations and others concerned that the incidence of child labour had indeed come down significantly over the past two decades. A ban on exports would hit the industry and leave many weavers jobless, he said after inaugurating an India Carpet Expo in Varanasi.

In the last fiscal, India’s exports of handmade carpets were around $800 million, with the U.S. market alone accounting for 50 per cent and Germany 20 per cent. India accounts for about 35 per cent of the world trade in handmade carpet. There are about 20 lakh artisans directly employed in carpet making, concentrated in Varanasi, Mirzapur, Bhadohi and Shahjahanpur (all Uttar Pradesh), Jammu and Kashmir, Jaipur and Panipat in Haryana.

Mr. Ramesh said Indian exporters were now in a position to give buyers the “Kaleen” certificate to confirm that child labour was not used in any way in the production of carpets.

Greater use of this certificate would also help in combating adverse propaganda by not only foreign countries but also NGOs and civil society groups in India.

The Union Ministries of Commerce, Labour and Women and Child Development were planning a joint initiative to check the incidence in carpet, garment, sports good and gem and jewellery units, where there is a strong public perception of the use of child labour.

THE Government is formulating a child trafficking law that will compel guardians and relatives to reveal their relationship with children in their custody.

The Minister of State for Youth, James Kinobe, said the Bill would help fight child abuse.

Many children, he said, were being trafficked out of and within the country, adding that some people operating brothels in slum areas like Bwaise engage the children in commercial sex.

The minister was on Friday addressing children, teachers, parents and children’s agencies at Buganda Road Primary School playground in Kampala, while commemorating the World Day on Stopping Violence Against Children.

The function started with a march led by the minister through the streets of Kampala. The children held placards with messages appealing to the public to stop violence against them.

Most of the cases of trafficked children in Switzerland come from Brazil, Peru, Albania and Cameroon (Reuters)

The Swiss section of the United Nations children's organisation Unicef has called on Switzerland to step up its fight against child trafficking.

It wants the government to draw up a national action plan on children's rights to deal with the trade in minors. The lack of data on such cases also needs to be amended, says Unicef. Presenting its "Switzerland and Child Trafficking" study, which was released on Thursday, Unicef said that Switzerland, like many other western European countries, was both a transit and destination country for child trafficking.

But the true scale of the problem was hard to define due to lack of statistical information.

"There is research done by the government and this stated that on a yearly basis 3,000 people are trafficked into Switzerland and this includes children," Elsbeth Müller, director of Unicef Switzerland, told swissinfo.

"They don't differentiate between children and adults, but from what we know and our experience it is clear that children are part of this."

Cases have been recorded involving minors from countries such as Albania, Cameroon and Brazil. Trafficked children usually end up working in the sex or drugs trade, said Müller.

Unicef has also pointed to cases of girls and boys being passed off – falsely - as children of asylum seekers.

Space to do more
 Although legal instruments – both national and international – do exist to protect children from trafficking in Switzerland, Unicef says there is "space to do more".
 It wants a national plan for children's rights, which would set out concrete measures against trafficking. This would follow long-standing recommendations by the UN.
 "One of the most important issues will be that children who are at risk of being trafficked and children who are trafficked will not be victimised and criminalised [under the Swiss system]," said Müller.

 "For Unicef it is important that these children get all the relevant support such as counselling but also the residency permit for Switzerland," she added.

 Granting residency would stop adults putting pressure on children and encourage young people to go to the police, says Unicef.

 International adoption
 International adoption is another aspect of child trafficking which affects Switzerland. "It can be linked with trafficking as soon as children are sold in a way that a substantial amount of money is involved," explained Müller.

 In Switzerland up to 600 children are adopted from abroad each year, with an estimated 30 and 90 per cent carried out outside official channels. Unicef believes there are some cases of illegal adoption.

 The Swiss study into trafficking was part of a wider Unicef report on the issue in Europe. This found that no country was immune from the illicit trade and called on governments not to forget the rights of the child in their anti-trafficking measures.

On a global level, it has been estimated that each year 1.2 million children are victims of trafficking, with the trade having a reported turnover of around SFr8.4 billion ($7.2 billion).

 Müller says prevention and raising awareness are key elements for stopping the trade. "And this means we all have to fight it, because every single child who is trafficked is one case too many," she said.

Like other countries, India doesn’t monitor trafficking accurately ; even Global numbers are  Broad estimates

Businesses in India’s fast growing economy may be judged by more than their employees, but also by the company they keep. Forced and trafficked labour are present in the supply chains of many Indian companies and most don’t know it, say analysts.

Some 12.3 million people around the world are forced to work in labour-intensive industries

For companies in most industries, the risk isn’t that victims of trafficking or forced labour will end up working directly for them, but rather for those providing services, from a subcontractor of a construction firm building a new plant to local food establishments that provide catering services.

While experts say the issue isn’t on the radar of most Indian companies, one of the few exceptions is Tata Steel Ltd.

“We see our job essentially as risk mitigation,” says Sanjay Singh, vice-president, public affairs, at Tata Steel. “We have to ensure that people that are drawn to the area because of the project are there because they have chosen to be. You can’t go around with one eye shut just because it is a matter of convenience.”

Worldwide, the largely black-market trade in people generates at least $32 billion (Rs1.25 trillion) a year, according to the International Labour Organization (ILO), which launched a major campaign on the issue in 2005.

Some 12.3 million people around the world are forced to work in labour-intensive industries such as construction, agriculture, sweatshops, food processing and preparation, domestic work, as well as the flesh trade, according to ILO.

“What we know is that South Asia trails only Southeast Asia in the number of trafficking victims, making it one of the most active places in the world for this and India is a major part of that,” says Patrick Belser, ILO’s Geneva-based research coordinator on forced labour, speaking via telephone from a hotel in New Delhi, where he was attending a UN-sponsored conference on trafficking in South Asia.

Like most governments, India doesn’t keep the necessary statistics to monitor trafficking accurately at the country level, meaning even the international numbers are broad estimates, says Belser.

One in five victims of forced labour is also a victim of trafficking, meaning they have been abducted, coerced or driven into their situation by fraud—usually a promise of a better job that has little resemblance to the one in which they end up. Once there, they often perform back-breaking physical labour with little to no protection from the elements, according to ILO and other UN bodies.

While the distinction between forced labour and trafficking can sometimes be blurred and some people can fall into both camps, those who aren’t victims of trafficking are often considered victims of forced labour because although they volunteer for work, they have to take on significant debt they have little to no chance of paying back, trapping them in the situation, say analysts.

“Fundamentally, the concerns that drive human trafficking are economic. Poverty, the desperate need for employment and other structural variables are prevalent here ” says PriceWaterhouseCoopers partner Anuradha Tuli. More than 300 million of India’s 1.1 billion people live on less than $1 a day, according to the World Bank.

A few Indian firms have taken a hard look at their supply chains—Tuli’s firm has worked with “a major tea producer” she declined to name—but most remain unaware or choose to ignore the issue.

On Thursday, a “Delhi Declaration” against trafficking was announced at the UN-sponsored conference. The declaration aims to forge alliances to fight trafficking and forced labour in South Asia, including development of a business coalition against the illegal trade in people here.

Non-profit organizations working against trafficking hope to see corporate sector involvement on several levels. “The government still doesn’t have a database that can track missing and exploited children and there are many firms that could help them accomplish that,” says Shireen Miller, head of policy and advocacy for Save the Children, Bal Raksha, Bharat.

“To the extent that they can target their employees and raise awareness so they don’t use child or forced labour in their homes, that would also be a welcome move.”
As for Tata Steel, it will virtually double its capacity away from its Jamshedpur base in Jharkhand into Chhattisgarh and Orissa. So, it is set to oversee a lot of construction work. The firm asks all contractors to sign and adhere to its code of ethics, which addresses human rights issues, and performs checks to look for things such as evidence of forced labour, said Singh. And the same would apply to any subcontractor hired by a firm working for Tata, he said.

The process isn’t necessarily an easy one, he notes: “The steel industry supply chain is very, very long.”

ND — Charles Kernaghan, director of the National Labor Committee, will speak on "Fighting to End Child Labor and Sweatshop Abuses in the Global Economy" on Thursday, October 11, at 11 a.m., in the University of Mary's Arno Gustin Hall.

For more than two decades, Kernaghan has devoted himself to bringing the issue of sweatshop abuses and child labor to the American people, traveling the world to uncover and call attention to worker and human rights abuses by corporate giants. Since 1990, he has served as director of the National Labor Committee (NLC), an independent, nonprofit human rights organization dedicated to helping defend the human rights of workers in the global economy. Investigating and exposing human rights abuses committed by U.S. companies producing goods in the developing world and undertaking public education, research and popular campaigns, under Kernaghan, the NLC has

helped shape the debate over outsourcing, calling for enforceable laws to protect women's and workers' rights and to end the "race to the bottom" in the global economy.

Kernaghan has spoken before numerous government bodies and subcommittees, as well as student, labor, human rights, and community groups, nationwide. He is the recipient of the 2006 Cultural Freedom Award from the Lannan Foundation.

http://www.kxmb.com/Sports/170245.asp

Child trafficking refers to the transport of a child from one place to another, whether within or across country-borders, where the trafficker experiences economic, or any other form of gain resulting from this movement.
This process can be described as a transaction, regardless of whether or not money was exchanged at the time the child was handed over, unlike people smuggling where they free the victim upon arrival at destinations.

It is an urgent human rights and development issue, which requires action-oriented research, multidimensional policy measures and aggressive operational responses. Child trafficking is more complex than a single act of wrongdoing: it is structural in nature and both reflects and has implications for the social, economic and organizational conditions in societies. For the child, it is an extreme and threatening violation of rights.

According to a research report of UNICEF in 1999, several ways by which children were trafficked in West and Central Africa were identified. These include abduction of children for sale by traffickers at a later date, trafficking as a service, whereby the trafficker places the child in employment and benefits from receipt of the child's wages, bonded placement, or trafficking for embezzlement.

Other factors are wars, lack of laws against child trafficking. Domestic violence also puts children at a high risk, especially the girl child.

Research shows that child trafficking routes in West and Central Africa reflect those used by the population themselves, from village to capital, capital to foreign country. Large numbers of children from Benin, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Mali, Nigeria and Togo are trafficked across West Africa and used as child labourers.

Socio-economic and demographic factors have played a significant role in the rise of the incidence of child trafficking according to UNICEF.

Debt and economic decline has placed millions below the poverty line, making children and their families more vulnerable to trafficking and other forms of exploitation, worse of all prostitution.

It is a known fact that Child trafficking is one of the gravest forms of child abuse in the world. It is a tragic situation, and a growing one. The effect of which can be devastating.

NEW DELHI: They still mop floors in bungalows of posh colonies and middle-class residences. They still serve at roadside eateries. And worse, their presence in hazardous occupations only seems to grow bigger and bigger.
      
One year after government banned the hiring of children as domestic helps or for employing in restaurants and eateries, the stigma of child-labour persists.
Millions of children still work in the banned professions, according to NGOs, with the law which came into force on Oct 10, 2006, 'more or less just on paper'.
"In the last one year, a mockery has been made out the law. Previously, only the stone-quarrying, zari factories and brick kiln industries were the offenders of the law. But now, with two additional areas included, the law is being flouted every next door," said Kailash Satyarthi of Bachpan Bachao Aandolan (BBA), an NGO working against child-labour.
      
The official records accessed under RTI by BBA revealed that only 6,669 children were identified across the country as child labourers, under last year's amendments in Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act, 1986.
      
In all, 872 prosecutions were launched against the offending employers, but not a single conviction had taken place during the last one year, it was revealed.
       
In case of the national capital, only 55 child labourers could be identified, while 290 of them were found in Bihar and just two in Uttarakhand, according to records.
      
Terming the findings as 'shocking', the NGO claimed there were more than 20 lakh children working as domestic helps in restaurants and dhabas in Delhi alone.
"What this indicates is a serious lack of political will and lack of preparedness on the part of government to implement the law. Efforts must be made to change this culture of breaking laws," Satyarthi said.
      
As per the 2001 census, there are nearly 12.6 million children working in India in the age-group of 5-14 years, but unofficial estimates put the figure at anywhere between 60 to 115 million.
      
Even though the government has taken some initiatives like establishing a Child Line service in cities, where violation of the ban could be reported, it has yielded little result.
      
"We hardly get a call reporting child-abuse or employment of child-labour for weeks at a stretch," said an attendant of a Child Line service.
On their part, the Labour department officials also admitted the delay in conviction of offenders.
      
"Legal matters take time and the convictions would take place soon. You must appreciate that so many prosecutions have been done in such a time," a senior labour ministry official, who did not wish to be named, said.
"Certainly, enforcement of the Act is a major problem and this has to be highlighted as on of the biggest challenges," the official of the Labour ministry said.
      
"Enforcement has its own problems. It is not easy to just barge into someone's home to raid and get the children out," he said, adding that currently, the focus was to create awareness and sensitise people about the problem.
      
Identifying the need for "a change in the mindset" of the people, Carlotta Barcaro of UNICEF India said, "Providing a roof on the head and food would not serve much purpose. People must realise the vulnerability of children.
      
"Besides, we must also take care of other aspects such as rehabilitation and providing safety nets in case of the children who are rescued out of illegal employment," Barcaro added.

While launching a two-year-long study on “ Code of conduct towards children in the informal sector”, organised by Children Sweden-Denmark along with Together with Working Children (TWE), it was revealed that as high as nearly one crore children in Bangladesh are engaged in hazardous work of some kind or the other. Dr. Abul Barakat, a well known economist of the country who conducted the two-year-long study blamed the earlier governments for sheer lack of commitment and foresight in tackling this vital problem well ahead of its snowballing. According to ILO estimates, children in Bangladesh are engaged in 54 different categories of hazardous work.

Given the debilitating scenario, it is also our observation that total eradication of child labour would not be possible since it is deeply embedded with the socio-economic conditions of the country. However, as has rightly been pointed by one of our former advisers to caretaker government, laws could be enacted with a code of conduct for strict implementation by those who deal in and employ child labour.

Our children are one of the most deprived sections of our population, both in the urban and rural areas. Those coming from poorer segments of the population are not only engaged in hazardous work but are often used and abused in innumerable ways.

We thus wish to urge the government to give an urgent and serious attention to the nutritional aspects of childcare and their access to education in bettering the overall conditions of our children.

It is also important to understand that in Bangladesh perspective, child labour is a deep rooted social problem driven by poverty and economic deprivation. Thus if we are to contain the situation, an extensive awareness campaign has to be undertaken through a proactive role of both the electronic and print media.

People who employ children should also be duly motivated to run training courses with government and NGO assistance to groom the children up for adult life.

CHILDREN who are forced to work as prostitutes or in the illegal labour market will be the top priority of the joint Irish/British crackdown on human trafficking launched last week.

A senior immigration garda said this weekend there have been a number of "suspicious movements" of children into the country in recent times. The cases are currently under investigation to establish whether they were brought into the country for "an ulterior motive".

While gardai say most children are trafficked into the country to be re-united with family members already here, there are concerns that some may be exploited as cheap labour and in the sex trade.

"There are a number of investigations ongoing, but an area of particular priority, is the whole area of suspected trafficking of minors," said Superintendent John O'Driscoll of the Garda National Immigration Bureau, this weekend.

"There have been a number of suspicious movements of children into the State which have caused concern in recent times. There are a number of possible motives for that. When children are arriving in unusual circumstances, in the majority of cases, on investigation it's found that children are being re-united with family members who have already entered the state. But we are trying to discover if, in any of those cases, there is an ulterior motive -- that is the centre of our attention at the moment."

The joint British and Irish operation, code-named Pentameter 2, was launched on Tuesday amid mounting concern in Europe over the trafficking of migrants. In July, a Bulgarian suspected of child trafficking admitted to an undercover BBC reporter that he smuggled children through Rosslare Port in Wexford. He subsequently offered to sell the children to the reporter for €60,000.

Superintendent O'Driscoll, who will liaise with his British counterparts on Pentameter, admitted this weekend that the extent of human trafficking in Ireland was still unclear.

"What is very important in relation to all of this activity is to realise that we do not know the extent of human trafficking in the state currently. That is very much part of this operation. Over the coming months, there is an effort being made to get a much better picture of the extent of what's going on," he said.

Pentameter 2 will see police in Ireland and across Britain sharing intelligence on human traffickers, but a new emphasis will be placed on the victims of trafficking. More than 100 gardai and PSNI officers will embark on a training programme at Templemore in the coming months designed to teach them how to identify victims of human trafficking.

Organisations such as Ruhama, which has worked with trafficking victims, will be invited to contribute to the training programmes. Ruhama has long claimed that the extent of human trafficking for the sex trade is far higher than is officially acknowledged. The group claims to know of more than 200 women who were trafficked into Ireland to work as prostitutes.

However, Brian Lenihan, the Justice Minister, has said there was no evidence of a significant human trafficking problem in Ireland, but has nevertheless promised legislation to strengthen the laws on trafficking.

The head of Britain's Human Trafficking Centre, Nick Kinsella, detective chief superintendent, will be in Dublin tomorrow to discuss the Pentameter 2 project with the Garda National Immigration Bureau. He will also address officers on the training course.