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Report on sexual slavery within the UAE.

The United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.) remains a destination country for men and women trafficked for the purpose of involuntary servitude and commercial sexual exploitation.

Read the full article here.

Relevant links (with excerpts):

Human trafficking from Armenia to Dubai, UAE

… when she arrived in Abu Dhabi she was taken to a brothel where a pimp told her that he had bought her for $7000. From that moment on she was to work as a prostitute until she paid off her so-called debt. After three months of captivity, Tanya managed to escape. She bolted to a police station and recounted her story. Incredibly, she was charged with prostitution and sentenced to three years in a desert prison. In 2001, psychologically crushed and ashamed, Tanya was released. Nothing happened to her pimp. Branded a prostitute by the Muslim nation, she was summarily deported back to her Ukraine.

Private sector ‘can help combat human trafficking’

He said T.S. and M.K. used the victim’s poverty to subjugate and exploit her into working in the sex industry unwillingly. “The couple bought her from an unidentified person for Dh4,300 after she reportedly abandoned her sponsor. When she refused to have sex with customers, she got brutally beaten by the female suspect,” said the Attorney General.

New study shames human traffickers

Countries in the Middle East have been named as the worst culprits of human trafficking.

A new report by an international trade unions’ umbrella organisation says Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Yemen are notorious destinations for women trafficked from Kenya.

Its report, ‘Trafficking in Persons — The Eastern Africa Situation’, notes that women and children were favourite targets for well-organised trafficking rings, which operate freely for lack of solid laws against the vice.

Stress on global network to fight human trafficking

A teacher in her home country, Noora says she was tempted by the promise of a good job and salary in Dubai. It was the first time that she had ever left her home country and her job and visa were arranged by a man she was put in contact with by a friend from her home town.

In her early 20’s at the time, Noora was told to expect a representative from the school where she was to work to collect her from the airport. Instead, she was met by a couple who took her to their home in Sharjah and locked her inside a room in a high-rise.

“The first couple of days were a blur. I kept asking when I was starting my job. The wife laughed and said there is no school - that I had to work as a prostitute,” she remembers. “I was terrified and couldn’t do anything. I was powerless.”

UAE: Probe begins into Indian Human Trafficking Racket

The 54 year-old visitor identified as A.K.S, 50, and his wife identified as M.S, were waiting for a connecting flight to Paris when they were arrested. They were reportedly carrying fake passports of two young boys accompanying them.

The data recorded in the passports of the two minors showed them to be the sons of the accused but upon questioning, the couple denied being the parents, claiming they had been asked by some people in Mumbai to hand over the children to someone in Paris.

Posted in UAE, Reports, Child traficking, Sex trade | No Comments

According to Asia Tribune:

For the past three years, the State Department has condemned Saudi Arabia for its policies on human trafficking, placing it in the category of most serious violators, or Tier 3 under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act.

Though sex trafficking also exists on a large scale in the USA.

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Blast from the past:

Mariam, 16, relives the day her father in Baghdad sold her off as a domestic worker in one of the prosperous Gulf nations. Instead, she was forced into the sex trade.

“I was a virgin and didn’t understand what sex was. I was told that they [the traffickers] were going to get good money for my first night with an old local man who paid for my virginity. He was aggressive and hit me all the time,” Mariam, who refused to reveal her real name, told IRIN.

Thousands of Iraqi women are being taken advantage of by unscrupulous sex worker traffickers seeking to exploit young girls’ desperate socio-economic situation for profit, United Nations agencies have reported.

In Mariam’s case, she was taken to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and kept in a house with 20 young girls, all of them sex workers, she said.

Before she left Iraq, she and her three sisters were being cared for by her father. Their mother was killed during the US-led invasion of the country in 2003.

-IRIN News

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Via Uruknet:

Dubai is of course not the only place in the Middle East famous for sex-trafficking; it faces stiff competition from Israel. BBC reports, in 2006 ‘the United Nations named Israel as one of the main destinations in the world for trafficked women; it has also consistently appeared as an offender in the annual US State Department’s Trafficking in Persons (Tip) report.’

Marina rarely leaves her two-room home in northern Israel these days. She is in hiding - wanted by the Israeli authorities for being an illegal immigrant, and by the criminal gangs who brought her here to sell her into prostitution.

Marina - not her real name - was lured to Israel by human traffickers.

During the height of the phenomenon, from the beginning of the 1990s to the early years of 2000, an estimated 3,000 women a year were brought to Israel on the false promise of jobs and a better way of life.

“When I was in the Ukraine, I had a difficult life,” said Marina, who came to Israel in 1999 at the age of 33 after answering a newspaper advertisement offering the opportunity to study abroad.

“I was taken to an apartment in Ashkelon, and other women there told me I was now in prostitution. I became hysterical, but a guy starting hitting me and then others there raped me.

“I was then taken to a place where they sold me - just sold me!” she said, recalling how she was locked in a windowless basement for a month, drank water from a toilet and was deprived of food.

MAIN ORIGINS OF WOMEN TRAFFICKED TO ISRAEL

-Russia
-Moldova
-Ukraine
-Uzbekistan
-Belarus

That part of her ordeal only ended when she managed to escape, but the physical and mental scars remain.

Last year, the United Nations named Israel as one of the main destinations in the world for trafficked women; it has also consistently appeared as an offender in the annual US State Department’s Trafficking in Persons (Tip) report.

Read the rest of the report here.

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Follow-up on this previously noted article about a French boy who was raped by 3 Emirati men in Dubai:

The public prosecution in Dubai yesterday demanded the maximum penalty for two Emirati men accused of raping a French-Swiss teenager in a case that has attracted international attention.

“I demand the maximum penalty against the two accused,” one of whom is said to be HIV positive, a representative of the public prosecution said at a hearing in the booming Gulf emirate.

Under the penal code in the United Arab Emirates, the maximum penalty if the suspects are convicted could mean a death sentence.

The prosecutor accused the pair of “losing their humanity and turning into human wolves” when they committed their alleged sexual assault against the 15-year-old boy in July.

The trial of the two UAE nationals opened on October 24. A third Emirati defendant, who is a minor, is being tried separately in a juvenile court.

The two accused, aged 18 and 36, committed “a horrible crime of abduction and rape, threatening (their victim) with a knife and baton, in an isolated desert spot,” the prosecutor said. The mother of the alleged victim, Swiss journalist Veronique Robert, told the tribunal that her role as a mother was to help her teenage son “rebuild and forget.”

“Only you can decide the punishment. But my mother’s heart tells you that God gives life and only God can take it away,” she said, visibly moved.

“I was drunk,” was all the older of the two defendants, who according to legal sources is HIV positive, said in court.

The trial was adjourned until November 28 to hear the defence arguments.

Source: AFP

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Glen Carey reports:

Fei Fei, a 22-year-old from China’s Guangdong province, has a souvenir of her eight months in Dubai: burns on her back and arms from cigarette butts crushed against her skin when she refused to work as a prostitute.

She eventually submitted when a criminal gang threatened to send nude photos of her to family members. That indignity, she said, would have been worse than selling her body.

“They take pictures of me naked in shower,” Fei Fei said in broken English as she pulled up her shirt to reveal the dark red circular marks. Soon afterward, she adopted the English name “Lucy,” and sold sex in Dubai bars for 500 dirhams ($130) a trick to claw back her freedom.

Fei Fei’s story symbolizes the dark side of Dubai, better known for its skyscrapers, sail-shaped hotel and man-made islands built in the shape of palm trees. The United Arab Emirates, of which Dubai is the second-largest member, is on a U.S. State Department watch-list for failing to take “meaningful steps” to end trafficking of women for prostitution and other workers trapped in conditions of slavery.

There are an estimated 10,000 victims of human trafficking in Dubai, according to the department’s 2007 report. U.A.E. officials say the figure overestimates the problem and that they have begun to take action, passing the first anti-trafficking law in the Middle East.

Read the rest of the report here.

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Recent article by Eva Sohlman reveals what certain women have to go through in Yemen when rape or romance is involved.

Excerpt:

There are also those in prison who have been raped and then rejected by their families, such as Noor, in Taizz in southwest Yemen. “It was very tragic. They say she was raped when she was 12 years old and got pregnant, but her father turned her into the police because of the shame [it brought upon the family]. They claimed she had prostituted herself,” says a European diplomat familiar with her case. He says Noor had been raped by some of her own male relatives and that the father had tried to save the family’s reputation by claiming she had prostituted herself. “She had no idea where to go if released. She was scared her male relatives would kill her to restore the family’s honor once she was out.”

Read the rest.

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From Arab News:

JEDDAH, 15 November 2007 — The General Court in Qatif yesterday doubled the number of lashes for a rape victim as well as jail terms for her assaulters. In its verdict, the court also suspended the victim’s lawyer from defending her.

The case was referred back to the General Court by the Appeals Court judges last summer after Abdul Rahman Al-Lahem, the victim’s lawyer, successfully contested against the initial verdict saying it too lenient for the rapists and unjust for the victim.

A year-and-a-half ago in the Eastern Province town of Qatif, a seven men gang-raped a 19-year-old girl 14 times. Three judges from the Qatif General Court sentenced the rape victim to 90 lashes for being in the car of an unrelated male at the time of the rape. The sentences for the seven rapists ranged from 10 months to five years in prison.

The Appeals Court sentenced the victim to 200 lashes and six months in prison. The seven rapists had their sentences increased to between two and nine years. The verdict came in as a shock to everybody.

A source at the Qatif General Court said that the judges had informed the rape victim that the reason behind doubling her punishment was “her attempt to aggravate and influence the judiciary through the media.”

Judge Soliman Al-Muhanna from the Qatif court told the lawyer (Al-Lahem) that the judicial committee had decided to suspend him from the case. They also confiscated his license which is granted to Saudi lawyers by the Ministry of Justice.

“I explained to them that it was my job to do everything legal in order to serve my client. But they did not listen,” he said.

To Al-Lahem’s surprise he received a call from the Judicial Investigation Department of the Ministry of Justice to inform him of a disciplinary session he should attend on 25th of the Hijra month.

“Actually this is the second time they have contacted me. They claim that I advertise my services and that that is against Saudi law,” he said.

Posted in Saudi Arabia, Rape | 1 Comment

The Deccan Herald reports:

An illegal immigrant of Indian descent is being tried in court here for exploiting a ”penniless housemaid” after he was caught attempting to sell her.

The Public Prosecution charged the 30-year-old suspect with breaching federal law on human trafficking for exploiting an Indonesian housemaid, Gulf News reported.

Apparently, the woman, who was in need of money, was forced into flesh trade by the accused. He has also been charged with illegally staying in the country.

The accused confessed to the charges and said he did not force the woman into prostitution and instead ‘’she was willing to do sex work”.

The suspect has pleaded not guilty before the Dubai Court of First Instance.An advocate will be assigned to defend the suspect.

Link to original article.

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