Human Trafficking in [Czech Republic Street Children in [Czech Republic] [other countries]Child Prostitution in [Czech Republic] [other countries] |
Human Trafficking & Modern-day Slavery Czech Republic [ Country-by-Country
Reports ] The Czech Republic [map], located in central Europe, is bordered by Slovakia (E),
Austria (S), Germany (W), and Poland (N).
The Czech Republic is a transit and destination country for
women from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Slovakia, Bulgaria, People's
Republic of China (P.R.C.), and Vietnam trafficked to and through the Czech
Republic for the purpose of commercial sexual exploitation. It is also a
source of Czech women trafficked to Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, and
Denmark for sexual exploitation. The Czech Republic is a destination country
for men and women trafficked from Ukraine, Moldova, the P.R.C., Vietnam,
Belarus, India, and North Korea for the purpose of labor exploitation. Ethnic
Roma women remain at the highest risk for trafficking internally and abroad
for sexual exploitation.
- U.S. State Dept Trafficking in Persons Report, June, 2007 [full
country report] |
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CAUTION: The following links have been culled
from the web to illuminate the situation in the ***
FEATURED ARTICLE *** Six charged
in organ trafficking case at Brno hospital Between 2003 and 2004, five
employees of the tissue bank at the Brno-Bohunice hospital, together with one
outsider, sold 7 million crowns worth of skin graft to a Dutch company. The
Organized Crime Squad of the Czech police have now finished investigating the
case and charged the persons involved with illegal organ trafficking. It took the Czech police three and
a half years to close the case of illegal organ trafficking at a hospital in
Brno, Moravia. Two skin tissue specialists, three other staff members and one
of their relatives have been charged with illegal organ trafficking, a crime
punishable in the Czech Republic only since 2002. The police operation, code
named "Human", the first of its kind in the country, targeted
illegal sales of skin graft to a Dutch company. ***
ARCHIVES *** U.S.
Dept of Labor Bureau of International Labor Affairs GOVERNMENT
POLICIES AND PROGRAMS TO ELIMINATE THE WORST FORMS OF CHILD LABOR - In 2002, the government provided some funding to local
NGOs that provide assistance to trafficking victims and those at risk of
being trafficking. With funding from
the U.S. Department of State, the NGO La Strada implemented an
awareness-raising program for Czech law enforcement officers on the needs of
trafficking victims and to develop an information database on trafficking. INCIDENCE
AND NATURE OF CHILD LABOR - There are some reports of the internal trafficking of Czech
children from areas of low employment near border regions with Bur of Democracy,
Human Rights & Labor - Country
Reports on Human Rights Practices - 2005 TRAFFICKING
IN PERSONS – Local
sex trafficking victims were generally young women between 18 and 29 years of
age from areas of high unemployment. Romani women were at the highest risk of
being trafficked internally, often by a friend or relative. Girls raised in
state‑run homes, such as orphanages, were also at particular risk.
According to government authorities, women already working as prostitutes
were also particularly vulnerable to traffickers. Trafficked women were
frequently offered jobs as models, maids, waitresses, and dancers through
employment agencies and then forced into prostitution. Once in a destination
country, traffickers ensured victims' compliance by confiscating their travel
documents and using isolation, drug and alcohol dependence, violence, threats
of violence toward the victim or her family, and the threat of arrest and
deportation. Police reported that traffickers increasingly relied on violence
to secure their victims' cooperation. Labor trafficking remained a
significant issue; the interior ministry reported that it was the most common
form of trafficking in the country. The International Organization for
Migration (IOM) and the NGO La Strada released a study during the year
documenting victims from a wide variety of countries, including the former
Soviet Union, South Asia, Concluding
Observations of the Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC) - 2003 [60] The Committee welcomes: (a) The
establishment in spring of 2002 of a trilateral Czech-German-Polish working
group to address, inter alia, trafficking in human beings, in particular the
sexual exploitation of children for prostitution occurring in these areas. Six charged
in organ trafficking case at Brno hospital Between 2003 and 2004, five
employees of the tissue bank at the Brno-Bohunice hospital, together with one
outsider, sold 7 million crowns worth of skin graft to a Dutch company. The
Organized Crime Squad of the Czech police have now finished investigating the
case and charged the persons involved with illegal organ trafficking. It took the Czech police three and a half
years to close the case of illegal organ trafficking at a hospital in Brno,
Moravia. Two skin tissue specialists, three other staff members and one of
their relatives have been charged with illegal organ trafficking, a crime
punishable in the Czech Republic only since 2002. The police operation, code
named "Human", the first of its kind in the country, targeted
illegal sales of skin graft to a Dutch company. NATASHAS
- The New Global Sex Trade Every day, scores of young women
throughout the former East Bloc are lured by job offers that lead to a
hellish journey of sexual slavery and violence. Despite the barrage of
warnings on radio and TV, in newspapers and on billboards, desperate women
continue to line up with their naiveté and applications in hand, hoping that,
this time, they might just be in luck. Czech
police detain Vietnamese human trafficking gang Czech police have detained four
male and two female Vietnamese in Prague who allegedly traded in people and
forced their female compatriots into prostitution in Prague and in southern
Bohemia. Vietnamese
women trafficked, rescued in Czech Republic They had to pay US$5,000 to $7,500
each, tricked into thinking that they were coming to Czech on legitimate
terms to well-paid jobs, but instead were forced into prostitution. Freedom
House Country Report - Political Rights: 1 Civil Liberties: 1 Status: Free Human Rights Overview by Human
Rights Watch – Defending Human Rights Worldwide Stop
Violence Against Women – Country Page U.S. Library of Congress
- Country Study Human
Trafficking - fighting an invisible crime With rising standards of living
and entry into the European Union, the Czech Republic is increasingly
becoming a destination for trafficked people. Victims usually originate in
less stable and less prosperous regions further east. Petra Burcikova has the
details: "Most of the victims that end
up trafficked in the Czech Republic come from the former Soviet Union, mostly
Moldova, Ukraine, Belarus, some of them from Russia, quite many from Bulgaria,
quite a few from Slovakia as well, and in the past two years, we have, for
the first time, had clients from Asia, from China and Vietnam. Recently we
also had a few clients from Central Asia." U.S.
Diplomat Leads Charge Against Human Trafficking Today marks the second day of
Miller's three-day visit to the Czech Republic. The ambassador said that
early in its transition from communism to a market economy, the Czech
Republic was what he calls a "source country" for slaves -- women
and children forced into prostitution, and men into factory and farm labor in
other countries. But he said that has changed. "As the Czech economy has
grown, the nature of the problem has changed," Miller said. "Today
if we look at trafficking in persons, or slavery, in the Czech Republic, we
are talking about the Czech Republic as a destination country. People coming
from Eurasia, Eastern Europe to the Czech Republic, engaging, being forced,
into the various types of slavery. Although, talking with the NGOs, it is
clear that the leading form of slavery in the Czech Republic is sex
slavery." PROFILE OF A CZECH VICTIM
TRAFFICKED ABROAD -
According to the La Strada data, it often concerns very young inexperienced
women. Most are between 18 and 22 years of age, in majority low educated
(elementary school, secretarial training, or high school graduates).
Trafficked victims often come from socially pathological background -
dysfunctional, broken or fragmentary families, frequently with the background
of domestic violence (alcoholism, abuse). Alcohol or drug addiction raises
the vulnerability of potential victims. Harnessed by their addictions, young
girls choose prostitution to support their drug habits. Drug addiction also
reinforces the girls' dependency on their pimps. This is tied to the
well-known issue of girls from orphanages who leave the institution at 18
without having a place to go. They are not adequately prepared for life and
lack basic social and other skills. The merchants sometimes directly target
orphanages, waiting for the girls to leave. Government
receives report criticising Slovak Romanies' situation The Czech government has received
a report criticising the living conditions of Slovak Romanies and comparing
them to a humanitarian crisis, the public Czech Television said today. According to the survey, the situation of
Slovak Romanies has worsened after the introduction of social reforms. Forced
prostitution, hunger and poverty reign among Slovak Romanies, the report
says. Report on human
trafficking praises Czechs The Czech Republic is the only
former Eastern bloc state listed as a Tier 1 country in the just released
U.S. Report on Human Trafficking. That
ranking, on a four-tier scale, indicates that the country is doing everything
possible -- prevention, victim aid, prosecution, arrest -- to curtail the
crime of human trafficking, which traps thousands of men, women and children
in forced labor and sexual servitude each year. In the Czech Republic human
trafficking is linked to street prostitution and forced sex work in the
country's more than 200 brothels. The victims are primarily from the poorest
ex-Soviet states, such as Ukraine and Moldova. U.S. Embassy political officer and
trafficking expert Ben Rockwell did castigate the country on two points,
however. First, sentencing in the Czech Republic, as in many countries, is
too light, according to Rockwell. And despite excellent police work, he said,
far too few traffickers are actually charged. Out of the five persons
convicted of human trafficking last year, four were sentenced to jail time,
but all of the sentences were suspended. Klara
Skrivankova: fighting trade in human lives CAN YOU GIVE ME EXAMPLE OF HOW,
SAY, A TEENAGE GIRL FROM UKRAINE IS LURED TO PRAGUE AND MADE TO WORK IN THE
SEX INDUSTRY? TELL ME HOW IT HAPPENS - "Well most of the time it's through some kind of
job offer. It can be either directly in the village, let's say somewhere in
Ukraine, where of course the situation is very hard and the possibility of
finding a job is basically zero. Either there or in some official place the
woman or the girl gets a job offer. It can be a job offer that explicitly
says that it involves the sex industry, but it can also be for example a job
picking mushrooms. So it's basically a job offer. And then it proceeds through
facilitation of transport, getting visas, which are usually taken care of by
the traffickers. When the woman gets to the Czech Republic she finds out
straight away that either the conditions are completely different or the work
itself is completely different than what was promised. So that's the very
basic scenario." WHAT KIND OF CONDITIONS ARE THESE
WOMEN KEPT IN? - "The
conditions can be very different, ranging from very hard physical violence to
more psychological manipulation and pressure, or debt bondage, or threats. So
the conditions vary. But usually the people are in quite a vulnerable
position because they are foreigners, because sometimes they don't have
papers, they're illegal here, and also because they don't know the
environment. They are purposely kept in isolation, so the only contact they
have is with the group with which they are kept it. It can range from one
extreme to the other." Human Trafficking
Casts Shadow on Globalization In 1996, Sasha was 26 and worked
as a waitress in a small town in the Czech Republic to support herself, her
daughter and her alcoholic husband. After a childhood rife with sexual abuse
and multiple rapes, already on her third marriage, and watching her country
struggle to emerge from a collapsed economy, she felt trapped in a cycle of
abuse and poverty. She was approached at work by a
Czech man who promised her a lucrative job in Germany. Believing that she
would be able to save money to ease her family's situation, she accepted the
offer and left for the West, along with three other girls. Her fears began
when her contact refused to return her passport after crossing the border,
and were confirmed when she got to her destination - a sleazy bar on the
outskirts of a German city. Once there, she was gang raped repeatedly to
obtain her compliance, and eventually taken to Amsterdam's red light district
where she was forced to become one of the many women behind the windows,
making as much as US$80,000 tax free for her traffickers in her first year. Child-prostitution
claims disputed KARO -- which receives funds from
the European Union and subsidies from the German state of Saxony and which
has monitored the issue since 1996 -- said it has observed about 500 girls
and boys who are in prostitution, most from west, north and south Bohemia and
Slovakia. The report, written by KARO social worker Cathrin Schauer, includes
shocking accounts of parents-turned-pimps forcing their children into the sex
trade to serve legions of German pedophiles flocking across the border. Romany
girls kidnapped, sold abroad According to the reports, which
have been substantiated by Roma community leaders and international human
rights observers, several young Slovak Roma women have recently been
kidnapped and then sold to Czech underworld figures. The captives are then
smuggled into western countries, where they are forced into prostitution. Following a story in late July in
the Czech press agency ČTK, the Slovak weekly magazine Moment reported
the case of Silvia Kováčová, an 18 year-old Roma girl from the small
village of Hencovce in eastern Slovakia, who had been kidnapped by a family
friend in mid July. She was driven to the nearby town of Vranov by the
friend, who said they were going to inquire about an available flower-selling
job for the girl. However, the car met with three
large men en route. "When we got there, I asked about the work selling
the flowers," Kováčová said. "But they all just started to
laugh... one of them then sprayed something in my face which knocked me out.
When I woke up we were outside Bratislava." Kováčová was then smuggled
into the Czech Republic by the kidnappers and was eventually sold at a gas
station to a local pimp in the Czech town of Teplice for the cash sum of 200
Deutsche marks ($93). All material used herein
reproduced under the fair use exception of 17 USC § 107 for noncommercial,
nonprofit, and educational use |
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Human Trafficking in [Czech Republic Street Children in [Czech Republic] [other countries]Child Prostitution in [Czech Republic] [other countries]