Human trafficking
Throughout human history, migration has been a courageous expression of the individuals will to overcome adversity and to live a better life. Today, globalisation, together with advances in communications and transportation, has greatly increased the number of people who have the desire and the capacity to move to other places. According to the UN, this new era has created challenges and opportunities for societies throughout the world. It also has served to underscore the clear linkage between migration and development and the opportunities it provides for co-development, that is, the concerted improvement of economic and social conditions at both origin and destination. Though the United States President Donald Trump appears to be taking the powerful country backward with several widely criticized steps against migrants and migration, the UN says migration draws increasing attention in the world nowadays.
Safe migration is a concept that allows aid programmes, activists and moral entrepreneurs to advocate for migrants in ways that attempt to evade a focus on repressive border control regimes. The concept of safe migration is not entirely new, but it has been gaining prevalence ever since organisations began to notice donor fatigue regarding human trafficking.
In the recent years we have witnessed an alarming increase in trafficking and smuggling of Bangladeshi migrant jobseekers through the Bay of Bengal under false promises of jobs. A recent report by the UNHCR estimates that 53,000 people from Bangladesh and Myanmar have attempted the unsafe sea passage to Malaysia and Thailand, during which 540 people died from beatings, starvation or dehydration. It has now become more imperative than ever to take concrete steps to address irregular maritime migration flow.
Even though Article 34 of the Overseas Employment and Migration Act, 2013 empowers different authorities, including the local police, elected local representatives and related ministries, to file cases against traffickers, till date no case has been filed under this law. Exemplary punishment must be meted out to fraudulent agents if we are to discourage them from tricking aspiring migrants, an overwhelming majority of whom come from impoverished and vulnerable backgrounds. We concur with civil society representatives working on migration that the government should create an inter-ministerial and inter-agency committee to prepare and implement an action plan to reduce unsafe passages. In addition, the government, recruiting agents and NGOs need to work together to ensure transparency and accountability of recruiting agencies and migration of skilled labour-power through legal channels.
