State Department's Trafficking Report: Azerbaijan Off The "Watch List" But Does Not Meet Minimum Standards Yet

Washington/20.07.22/Turan: Azerbaijan has been upgraded from the "Watch List" of the U.S. State Department's Trafficking in Persons Report (TIP) to a Tier 2 ranking, meaning that its government "does not fully meet the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking but is making significant efforts to do so," according to the authors, TURAN's Washington correspondent reports.

In its annual TIP report, which was released on Tuesday, the State Department noted that the Azeri government "demonstrated overall increasing efforts" compared with the previous reporting period, considering the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on its anti-trafficking capacity; "therefore Azerbaijan was upgraded to Tier 2," - it explained.

"We know that in many places the pandemic has affected many lives and many issues in each country. But what we’ve really tried to do is be very careful about understanding and only taking into account consistently and fairly the ways that the pandemic may have affected governments’ anti-trafficking efforts specifically," Kari Johnstone, a senior State Department official in charge of combatting human trafficking, told TURAN's correspondent during the department's daily briefing, when asked about the pandemic's trafficking-specific impact and its implications for countries such as Azerbaijan.

"For example, if courts were closed for a considerable amount of time, that might explain why convictions that year were down, for example. So we really honed in on the trafficking-specific impact of the pandemic," she explained.

As for the Azeri government's efforts to address the trafficking problem, these included "convicting slightly more traffickers and continuing to issue more significant sentences and fewer suspended sentences than in previous years," reads the report. The government increased victim protection efforts, including identifying more victims and increasing funding toward victim assistance and the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MIA)-run anti-trafficking shelter. It also amended laws to expand victim identification efforts to include the State Migration Service and measures to prevent revictimization of foreign national victims.

However, the government did not meet the minimum standards in several key areas, according to the report: "The government investigated and prosecuted fewer suspects and lacked proactive identification efforts, particularly for Azerbaijani victims of internal trafficking and victims of forced labor. While the MIA funded repairs for an NGO-run shelter and funded another NGO-run shelter to buy land for a new shelter, the government allocated fewer resources to NGOs, including operational costs for NGO-run shelters. The government continued its moratorium on scheduled and unannounced labor inspections through 2022," reads the report.

This years' report also prioritizes recommendations including increasing efforts to vigorously investigate, prosecute and convict traffickers and sentence them with adequate penalties which should involve significant prison terms..

Other recommendations include: increase proactive identification efforts, particularly for internal trafficking, forced labor, and child trafficking; Increase and allocate adequate funding to NGO-run shelters providing victim support services; train investigators, prosecutors, and judges on victim-centered approaches to trafficking cases, including for children, and provide advanced training on trafficking investigations and prosecutions, among other key steps.

This year's report also contained a separate list of 12 countries that employ or recruit child soldiers that included Russia and a number of those included in the new state-sponsors section.

“Millions of Ukrainians have had to flee their homes ... some leaving the country altogether, most with just what they were able to carry,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken told a ceremony as he presented the report. “That makes them highly vulnerable to exploitation.”

Blinken also said that currently there are nearly 25 million trafficking victims worldwide.

In addition to Russia, the new state-sponsors section listed Afghanistan, Burma, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and 5 other countries with a documented "policy or pattern" of human trafficking, forced labor in government-affiliated sectors.

Alex Raufoglu

Washington D.C.