Tag Archives: Topic: Trafficking

Telegraph: A British schoolgirl was murdered by health workers in India in a failed attempt to harvest her organs, her parents have claimed.

Washington Times: A Bush-era rule that forbids some federal AIDS money to go to groups unless they “explicitly” oppose prostitution and sex trafficking is heading to the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday.

Richard Wolfe at USA Today: Fights against AIDS, sex traffic collide at high court At stake is a little-known provision in the law, intended mainly to combat HIV/AIDS, requiring most outside organizations that receive federal funds to have policies “explicitly …

LifeNews: There’s gold in them thar hills! Ounce for ounce, human eggs are probably the most valuable commodity on the planet, with highly intelligent and beautiful university women offered $50,000 or more for their ova for use in eugenic IVF.

NPR: More than 23,600 people were victims of human trafficking in Europe during a recent three-year period, according to a new European Union report that says the problem is growing worse. Its authors say the official figures do not come close to describing the crime . . .

Christian Post: More than 500 Christian girls have been reported kidnapped in Egypt since the revolution began in January 2011, with the age of the girls kidnapped usually being between 12 and 14.

New Yorker: Last week, a young man came to the doors of the Seventy-Two, a shelter for migrants in Tenosique, Mexico, to deliver a message from a local offshoot of the Zetas, Mexico’s most vicious organized-crime group. “What we want is the head of the friar who is in charge of all this,” the man said. “We are going to the shelter today to get all of them.”

Religion Clause Blog: Yesterday the President’s Advisory Council on Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships presented its recommendations on combating human trafficking in a 35-page report titled Building Partnerships to Eradicate Modern-Day Slavery.

Guardian: Slavery in the modern world varies from trafficking for sexual exploitation, to forced labour of children as domestic workers, to forced labour of girls in manufacturing garments for high-street brands in Europe.

LifeNews: Great Britain’s Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), which oversees fertility treatments and embryo research in that nation, recently approved fertility procedures that would amount to the genetic engineering of children through cloning (nuclear transfer) technology and germ-line modification, resulting in a “three-parent embryo” that would have genetic material from two mothers and one father.

AP: Government statistics in South Sudan show half the girls there aged 15 to 19 are married, with some brides as young as 12 years old.

Bruce J. Clemenger at Evangelical Fellowship of Canada: Recently a fertility clinic in the United States made news for not only selling human sperm and eggs, but human embryos as well. While many responded with disdain, National Post columnist Marni Soupcoff questioned the validity of the objections.

LifeNews: When it comes to babies who are diagnosed with some sort of fetal abnormality in the womb, the pressure is high from doctors, family members and society to have an abortion. That’s why approximately 90 percent of babies with Down syndrome, for example, become victims of abortion.

AP: Police questioned 30 people on Tuesday and searched the homes of six employees of a private fertility clinic who are suspected of illegally trafficking human eggs and selling them to Israeli couples with fertility problems.

First Things: After the 2009 Super Bowl in Miami, the Florida Department of Children and Families reported more than twenty children identified as sex trafficking victims in conjunction with the big game.

Telegraph: In Jordan, hundreds of Syrian females have been affected by an informal trade that has sprung up since the start of the war in Syria, where men use “agents” to source Syrian refugees to use for sex. Often this is done under the guise of “marriage”: The ‘dowry’, which in Muslim society is traditionally paid by the groom as a guarantee of the bride’s security has become a payment for sex. And the “marriage”, is an affair that lasts only a few days or even hours.

LifeSiteNews: A study of the impact of legalized prostitution has found that countries where prostitution is legal experience larger reported human trafficking inflows than countries in which prostitution is prohibited. Professor Eric Neumayer of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and a team of researchers analyzed data on human trafficking from a global sample of 116 countries in order to determine what effect a country’s domestic policy on prostitution has on trafficking, whether as a country of origin, transit or destination for victims.

AP: Attorney General Eric Holder and European Union Commissioner for Home Affairs Cecilia Malmström will launch a global alliance targeting online child sexual abuse, building on the success of cross-border police operations that have dismantled international pedophile networks.

AP: Medical and police authorities are launching a major international probe into the illegal trafficking in human organs for transplants, to help clamp down on the crime, one of the researchers said Thursday.

Washington Times: My stepfather used threats against my mother to gain my complete surrender to him and his pedophile sex trafficking ring.

AP: A federal judge has blocked part of a voter-approved ballot initiative related to human trafficking, until a court hearing can be held later this month. The decision temporarily halts a provision of Proposition 35 that requires registered sex offenders to give authorities a list of their Internet providers and screen names. The initiative, passed Tuesday with 81 percent support, toughens penalties on those convicted of human trafficking.

Susan Straight at NY Times: Sometimes life is like a fun-house mirror, the glass and then the real thing. I had just watched the TV show “The New Normal,” a comedy about what used to be called untraditional families, for the first time, and the same day I read about Mitt Romney’s son Tagg and his wife, Jennifer, having twins through a surrogate pregnancy, using the same surrogate mother they had back in 2009. A week later, a few choice remarks were made about single mothers in the presidential debate.

ACLU: Today, President Barack Obama signed an executive order that will give better protections to vulnerable workers employed by government contractors. The order, announced on the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, lays out new requirements for U.S. government contractors and their subcontractors operating overseas to prevent human trafficking and forced labor.

NY Post: The New York Organ Donor Network pressured hospital staffers to declare patients brain dead so their body parts could be harvested — and even hired “coaches” to train staffers how to be more persuasive, a bombshell lawsuit charged yesterday.

See SCOTUS Blog Petition of the Day reporting on: Agency for International Development v. Alliance for Open Society International, Inc., No. 12-10

LifeNews: Increasingly we are learning about the deep-seeded prejudice against girls in some Asian countries. With an estimated 163 million women in Asia “missing” due to sex-selective abortion, which is equivalent to the entire female population of the United States, the lives of Asian women are getting worse not better.

LifeSiteNews: A campaign by Peru’s Planned Parenthood affiliate to lower the age of sexual consent to fourteen years of age is being condemned by the nation’s Catholic bishops as a potential boon for sex trafficking of minors, as well as an incentive to abortion and other vices

FRC Blog: The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), a five-year recipient of the funding, has an Anti-Trafficking Services Program through its Migration and Refugee Services division, which has proven highly effective for more than ten years. Despite this program’s proven track record of helping people escape slavery and start a new life, when the USCCB re-applied for grant funding in 2011, the application was denied. The only explainable reason? The program fails to offer victims sterilization, contraception, and abortion.

Ilya Somin at the Volokh Conspiracy: New Zealand economist Eric Crampton recently posted an interesting interview on organ markets that he did with Radio New Zealand. Like the United States, New Zealand faces a shortage of organs available for transplant, as a result of which many people die before appropriate organs can be found for them.

Washington Post: Australia’s attorney general on Wednesday introduced legislation that would broaden the legal definition of slavery to include organ trafficking and forced marriage.

BBC: Every year thousands of women are forced into prostitution and traded from Mexico to the United States. The BBC investigates the sex trafficking business, which makes some men very wealthy at the expense of vulnerable young women.

AP: An outspoken priest who runs a shelter for migrants in southern Mexico has temporarily left his facility after receiving death threats, the shelter coordinator said Monday.

Christian Science Monitor: Like the thousands of women who fled North Korea before her, Kim Eun-sun made it into China and paid a woman to help her, only to discover she’d traded one form of captivity for another.

Washington Post: The exploitation of Afghanistan’s ‘dancing boys’: A growing number of Afghan children are being coerced into a life of abuse as a result of the practice of wealthy or prominent Afghans exploiting underage boys as sexual partners.

Independent: Foreign Office reveals cases from Italy, Holland, Australia, Indonesia and Nigeria, with one in five victims a man, and ages ranging from five to 87.

LifeSiteNews: A federal judge has ruled that allowing government grants to Catholic-run programs against human trafficking amounts to an unconstitutional endorsement of the Catholic religion because the Church does not facilitate abortions for trafficking victims.

AP: It was barely 4 a.m. when 19-year-old Rinkal Kumari disappeared from her home in a small village in Pakistan’s southern Sindh province.

AP: A Canadian man testified Friday that he paid $105,000 ((EURO)80,000) to an Israeli citizen in 2008 to organize a kidney transplant in a Kosovo clinic allegedly used by an international organ trafficking network for dozens of illegal operations.

Daily Mail: Shocking new evidence of the trade in human body parts has revealed how British patients could be buying organs from executed prisoners for £50,000.

Washington Post: China will abolish the transplanting of organs from executed prisoners within five years and try to spur more citizens to donate, a top health official says.

AP: But prosecutors say being a trusted source also allowed her to lure them into unwittingly helping her build a baby manufacturing business spanning two continents that netted millions.

News from The Associated Press: Life seemed to give Karla Zepeda a break when a woman came to her dusty neighborhood of cinderblock homes and dirt roads looking for babies to photograph in an anti-abortion ad campaign.

CBS 5 – KPHO: Sheriff Joe Arpaio had his first run-in with a group of suspected illegal immigrants since things heated up with the Department of Justice.

AP: Indiana political leaders are looking to fast-track sex-trafficking legislation before football fans flood Indianapolis for the Super Bowl.

News from The Associated Press: “Many people are surprised to learn there are more people trapped in slavery today than any time in history,” said Jacquelline Fuller, director of charitable giving and advocacy for Google.

Lisa Correnti and Wendy Wright at C-FAM Friday Fax: The same week U.S. Secretary Hillary Clinton told a conference in Senegal that family planning is a “basic right,” the U. S. Congress was investigating the Obama administration’s rejection of a highly qualified group to receive a grant to help trafficking victims because it does not offer contraception and abortion. The grant was awarded instead to a group that “had no plan on how objectives would be met.”

News from The Associated Press: Chinese police arrested 608 suspects and rescued 178 children in busts of two separate child trafficking networks, authorities said Wednesday.

The Washington Post: French lawmakers are expected to pass a symbolic resolution that would condemn prostitution as linked to human trafficking and violence before beginning debate on a tough proposed law that would punish clients.

(AP) Boston.com: Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has ordered an “extensive and thorough review” of a foreign exchange program that has been used by U.S. businesses as a source of cheap labor and exploited by criminals to import women to work in the sex industry.

A federal appeals court says some bone marrow donors can be paid, overturning a decades-old law that made such compensation a crime.

News from The Associated Press: A new report says 41 states have failed to adopt strong penalties against human trafficking, and advocates say a patchwork of differing state laws makes it difficult for authorities to target the crime.

More information at the Legal Scholarship Blog: Sex Trafficking in the U.S.: Researching Vulnerable Populations – Corvallis, OR.

CSMonitor.com: One of the most hidden and hideous crimes in America is the sex trafficking of children. But this selling of minors quickly becomes less hidden when Internet sites for community advertising become giant magnets for the sex trade.

LifeNews.com: The nation’s Catholic bishops are considering a lawsuit against the Obama administration for denying a grant previously granted for a program helping victims of sex trafficking because the bishops would not refer the women for abortions.

The Washington Post: On the trafficking contract, senior political appointees at HHS awarded the new grants to the bishops’ competitors despite a recommendation from career staffers that the bishops be funded based on scores by an independent review board, according to federal officials and internal HHS documents.

South Korea: Unlike most other countries, credit card users in South Korea have no option to pay off their debt over months or even years. Instead, they must pay off the full balance in 30 days, which makes it easy for borrowers “paying 25% plus annual interest rates to fall behind.” It is not uncommon for lenders to take possession or even repossess borrowers homes to pay their debts. When a poor woman like You Mi Kim, becomes delinquent, she often turns to private lenders for quick cash.

Bloomberg: A New York man admitted to brokering black-market sales of human kidneys to three Americans, becoming the first person convicted in the U.S. of organ trafficking. Levy Izhak Rosenbaum, 60 . . .

DesMoinesRegister.com: Despite this, with somewhere between 12 million and 27 million people enslaved around the world and global profits from the slave trade amounting to about $31.6 billion according to the International Labour Organization, Congress wants to cut the budget for programs to combat human trafficking.

LifeSiteNews.com: After a CNN report this week condemned an illegal surrogacy ring run by high-profile fertility lawyers, one expert says that media and the pro-life community alike still fail to acknowledge the corruption endemic in the entire “baby trafficking” business – whether legal or not.

American Civil Liberties Union: The American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Massachusetts argued in federal court today that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) must be prohibited from imposing religiously based restrictions on reproductive health services for victims of sex trafficking.

Catholic Culture: Wealthy Pakistanis, including Christians, are being kidnapped by members of al-Qaida in order to gain ransom money for funding their operations, according to the national director of the Pontifical Mission Societies.

LifeNews.com: The Obama administration recently posted a new document to the White House web site touting its efforts to combat sex trafficking in the United States. But the document ignores Planned Parenthood — the abortion business where undercover investigations earlier this year revealed staff willing to arrange for abortions for sex traffickers.

Laura J. Lederer at Public Discourse: A culture of exploitation and violence, especially sexual exploitation of children, is at epidemic levels here in the United States and around the world. The current Administration’s response is anemic and more must be done.

Telegraph: Allegations that Kosovo’s prime minister led a criminal gang that sold the organs of prisoners captured during the country’s war of independence against Serbia are to be investigated by an American prosecutor.

Spero News: A Christian family consisting of 26 persons, including women and children, was enslaved in Pakistan for over 30 years.

Guardian.co.uk: Only recognised orphanages in China will be able to offer infants for adoption to prevent demand for abducted children.

Ga. Family Council: Many Georgians are shocked to find out that Atlanta is one of the nation’s top places for sex trafficking, where men and women (and children) are trapped in prostitution.

LifeNews.com: The one-child policy in China has resulted in more than just forced abortions and sterilizations — it has led to massive cases of child trafficking as families attempt to buy children.

CSMonitor.com: Travel companies, airlines, and other parts of corporate America are starting to provide training programs to help employees recognize human trafficking. Will heightened awareness help detect more trafficking cases?

Christian Concern: A new IVF ‘lottery’, set to be launched this month, will allow members of the public to ‘win’ a baby after purchasing a £20 ticket online.

LifeNews.com: A young teenage girl who was recently found after spending more than a year as a sex trafficking victim is an example of the kind of concerns pro-life advocates presented earlier this year about Planned Parenthood.

AP: Dozens of pregnant teenagers found at an illegal clinic in Nigeria and accused of trying to sell their babies are helping investigators find the organizers of baby trafficking rings, officials said.

NYTimes.com: M. is an ebullient girl, age 10, who ranks near the top of her fourth-grade class and dreams of being a doctor. Yet she, like all of India, is at a turning point, and it looks as if her family may instead sell her to a brothel.

News Releases – Press – United States Senator John Cornyn, Texas: U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, today issued the following statement applauding the efforts of state leaders to prevent human trafficking, as Gov. Rick Perry signed Senate Bill 24, which will impose increased penalties on human traffickers and those who engage in child prostitution.

LifeNews.com: Members of Congress, demographers and representatives from leading human rights organizations are launching a new effort today designed to target gendercide — the practice of eliminate girls via sex-selection abortions, infanticide, or selling or giving away infant or young girls.