Marshall Islands focusing on trafficking

Transcript

GIFF JOHNSON:  The Marshall Islands has been doing a number of trainings the past year with the recent one this past month in both Majuro and Ebeye where they brought in a law enforcement official from Europe whose trained and focussed in the area of trafficking and persons to go over things with local law enforcement and other service providers, so there was something in the order of 30 or 50 people, who attended the two training's that were each a week long on Majuro and Ebeye, and this is part of a bigger effort to respond to the downgrading of the Marshall Islands in the annual US trafficking persons report.  For the past two years now the Marshall Islands has been at the bottom of on what they call Tier 3 which is considered the worst level of the trafficking report and so their efforts to try and get the country moved up on that listing by the US State Department.

MOERA TUILAEPA-TAYLOR: Is this the first time this type of training has happened or is this an ongoing thing in the Marshall Islands?

GJ:  In over the past year, things have started moving a bit more. The national government, this past year, finally adopted a national plan of action to combat trafficking and persons, so that kind of set some of the mechanism for follow through and then they are doing workshops to train first responders.  I think the challenge here is for these folks who go to these workshops get briefed by people from other countries who have experience in addressing trafficking issues and actually go do something in their own community because there are things going on in the Marshall Islands that might or might not be trafficking but there are activities that might be prostitution related or might be whatever they are but simply are not being addressed by local authorities so I think that's the challenge now there have been a series of these workshops for the last year and the State Department has funded a lot of this and the International Organisation for Migration has been an important link is this and helping to roll out these awareness raising programmes, so now it's time for these folks to start using what they have been learning in the workshop.