Identifier
Created
Classification
Origin
05ACCRA433
2005-02-28 18:49:00
UNCLASSIFIED//FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY
Embassy Accra
Cable title:  

GHANA 2005 TRAFFICKING-IN-PERSONS REPORT (PART TWO

Tags:  KCRM PHUM KWMN SMIG KFRD ASEC PREF ELAB GH 
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UNCLAS SECTION 01 OF 06 ACCRA 000433

SIPDIS

SENSITIVE

DEPT FOR G/TIP/RACHEL YOUSEY, G, INL, DRL, PRM, IWI, AND
AF/RSA, PLEASE PASS TO USAID

E.O. 12958: N/A
TAGS: KCRM PHUM KWMN SMIG KFRD ASEC PREF ELAB GH
SUBJECT: GHANA 2005 TRAFFICKING-IN-PERSONS REPORT (PART TWO
OF TWO)

REF: A. 04 STATE 273089


B. ACCRA 0432

THIS IS THE SECOND OF A TWO-PART CABLE SUBMISSION IN RESPONSE
TO REF A.

-------------- --------------
Para 20: Investigation and Prosecution of Traffickers
-------------- --------------


A. (U) There is no specific provision in Ghanaian law
outlawing trafficking in persons. There are laws against
slavery, prostitution, rape (or child rape, termed
"defilement"),use of underage labor, manufacture of
fraudulent documentation, etc. Traffickers are prosecuted
under these statutes. However, the final draft of an
anti-trafficking law is currently ready for consideration by
Cabinet, and will undergo revision before it is put to
parliament for a vote. Due to preparations for national
elections in December 2004, movement on this (and other)
legislation was delayed in the few months prior to elections.
A Cabinet reshuffling took place in early 2005, including new
appointments at the three key ministries involved with
anti-trafficking issues. Nevertheless, the MOWAC and MMYE
submitted their comments on the bill to the Attorney General
in early 2005. The AG was reviewing the ministries' comments
before putting the bill to Cabinet for consideration as of
March 2005. With the elections over and a new government in
place, GoG and NGO stakeholders predict the bill, which is
not view as controversial, will pass by mid-2005.


B. (U) There are currently no specific penalties for
trafficking, but penalties for related offenses range from
six months to 25 years (see above). In the final draft of the
trafficking legislation, the penalties for trafficking or the
harboring of a trafficked person include minimum sentences of
five years in prison. Additionally, a person who fails to
dutifully inform law enforcement authorities about
trafficking will face fines and/or up to a year in jail.


C. (U) In June 1998, Parliament passed comprehensive
legislation to protect women and children's rights. The bill

doubled the mandatory sentence for rape, making it punishable
by 5 to 25 years in prison. It also banned the practice of
ritual servitude, criminalized indecent assault and forced
marriage, and raised the punishments for defilement, incest,
and prostitution involving children.


D. (U) Traffickers have been prosecuted under statutes listed
in para 20 A. Penalties imposed range from several months to
many years in prison. Sentences for rape or defilement, for
example, are often 10 to 15 years in length. Precise data on
prosecutions for trafficking is not available because
information on sentencing of traffickers is not kept
separately from other data on sentencing for rape,
kidnapping, and other offenses for which traffickers can be
prosecuted. (See also para 18 G).


E. (U) Within Ghana, brokers or recruiters procure children
from rural areas and move them to the locations where they
will work (see para 18 B). These recruiters may move as many
as ten children at one time. These traffickers tend to be
freelance operators. There are no reports available about
where profits from trafficking are being channeled. It is
generally presumed that domestic traffickers keep all profits.


F. (SBU) Local law enforcement does not use any special
techniques in the investigation of trafficking. There are
several cases that involved detection of trafficking by law
enforcement authorities through tip-offs by local residents,
and arrests have been made (under the related offenses
mentioned above).

The GoG actively investigates cases of trafficking. Interpol
reports that, in 2004, there were six trafficking cases
investigated through Interpol, involving a total of 18
children and eight adults. In all but two cases,
investigations were ongoing at year's end. In one case, the
trafficker managed to escape and in the other case, the
trafficker was being held in Nigerian custody (see below this
para). There were two high-profile cases that highlighted the
efforts by Interpol and GoG agencies to identify children who
had been trafficked to other countries. In April 2004,
through the coordinated efforts of the GoG and the Government
of The Gambia, twelve Ghanaian girls were identified and
brought home (see para 18 B for more information about this
trafficking route). According to Interpol, a local Ghanaian
informant tipped off UNICEF, which then in turn contacted
Interpol-Ghana about the case. Interpol-Ghana contacted
Interpol-Gambia to verify the accuracy of the report. Upon
verification of the report, the Department of Social Welfare
worked with Gambian officials to repatriate the twelve girls.

In a second case in November 2004, Interpol and the
Department of Social Welfare received information from a
local informant about six girls who had been trafficked to
Nigeria. After verifying the case details, the Ghanaian
embassy in Nigeria assisted in bringing the girls to the
Ghana-TOGO border in late December 2004. An Interpol official
brought the girls from the border to Accra, at which point
the Department of Social Welfare became responsible for
rehabilitating and reintegrating them. (Note: GoG authorities
involved in this case note that the Nigerian authorities were
uncooperative in helping to repatriate the girls. The
Nigerian woman accused of trafficking is currently in
Nigerian custody and no information has been shared with the
GoG about her case status).

The Interpol official told Emboff that (once an informant's
report has been verified) the Interpol official sometimes
pays the informant out of her own pocket as a reward for the
information. She notes that after some informants have come
to her, they find themselves at risk because traffickers have
threatened them. For example, she has not heard from the
informant in the Nigerian case since he initially approached
her.


G. (U) The National Plan to Combat Trafficking includes a
training component for police and immigration officials. The
Ghana Immigration Service (GIS) attempts to identify
traffickers and trafficked persons through the detection of
fraudulent documentation. The GIS has received training from
the USG and other foreign countries on fraud in the past,
which has been well-received. Many government officials and
law enforcement agencies have attended training sponsored by
local and international NGOs in the past year.


H. (U) See para 20 F for information about cross-border
cooperation.


I. (U) There have been no extraditions of persons charged
with trafficking in other countries. The Department of Social
Welfare notes that although it does not trust the prosecution
efforts of the Nigerian government in the December 2004 case
(see para 20 F),it cannot make an extradition appeal for
this woman since Ghana does not yet have an anti-trafficking
law. (See also para 18 H for details of a USG extradition
case and the GoG's response to it).


J. (U) There is no evidence of government involvement in or
tolerance of trafficking, on a local or institutional level.


K. (U) See para 18 H.


L. (U) Ghana does not have an identified problem with child
sex tourism. However, in October 2004, ILO-Ghana said that
information was reaching its offices to indicate that
Ghanaian children have been involved in internet pornography.
In October 2004, a Dutch national was convicted on charges of
filming Ghanaian girls for internet pornography. He was
sentenced to fines and jail time, as well as immediate
deportation after finishing his sentence. The accused first
entered Ghana in 1988. After ongoing surveillance of the
man's travel and activities, the Ghana Immigration Service
conducted a sting operation after a tip-off about the man's
return to Ghana in October 2004.


M. (U) Ghana's status on the ILO conventions and UN protocols
are as follows:

ILO Convention 182 - Ratified, 6/13/00
ILO Convention 29 - Ratified, 5/20/57
ILO Convention 105 - Ratified, 12/15/58
UN Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the
Child (CRC) on the sale of children, child prostitution, and
child pornography - Signed but not ratifed, 9/24/03
UN Option Protocol to Prevent, Suppress, and Punish
Trafficking in Persons, especially against Women and Children
- Not signed
--------------
Para 21: Protection and Assistance to Victims
--------------


A. (U) The GoG does provide resources for victims of
trafficking (see para 18 G). In many cases, the authorities
do try to reunite trafficked and abused children with their
families (see para 20 F). NGOs have sought to provide
services the police and social services cannot by
establishing a few crisis centers. However, as awareness of
the problem grows and trafficking victims seek assistance,
the limited resources for providing such assistance become
more strapped. According to the Department of Social Welfare,
the two children's homes it runs in Accra are stretched
beyond capacity. The head of the trafficking unit at Interpol
notes that these two facilities, which are used as temporary
shelters for children who have been rescued before they are
repatriated, are more suitable for younger children than for
some of the older children who have been brought back. She
underscored the need for appropriate space for children and
'victim-friendly' accommodation. WAJU opened up two new
offices in the Greater Accra Region in 2004 to help manage
the overwhelming caseload that WAJU-Accra has been handling.
(Note: WAJU handles a wide variety of cases, such as domestic
violence, rape, defilement and child neglect, as well as
trafficking. End note).

The Department of Social Welfare, WAJU, and Interpol all
predict that resources for such space will come with passage
of the trafficking legislation. In the pending
anti-trafficking legislation, the Department of Social
Welfare has the mandate to rescue, rehabilitate, and
reintegrate victims, with the assistance of police, NGO, and
others. As the Attorney General wrote in the introduction to
the draft legislation that was completed in 2004: "The
rehabilitation of victims is crucial to their re-integration
and to that end, the Department of Social Welfare and the
National Vocational Training Institute are to provide victims
with employable skills, facilitated with start up capital
from the Trafficking Fund. Compensation may be ordered by the
court for the victim and any person who causes injury may
also be ordered to pay compensation to the injured person. In
order to facilitate the welfare of victims, a Trafficking
Rehabilitation Fund is established. The object of the Fund is
towards health needs, skills training, family tracing and
other matters connected with the rehabilitation and
re-integration of victims. The management of the Fund is to
be under the auspices of the Ministry of Women's and
Children's Affairs."


B. (U) See para 19 E and para 18 G.


C. (U) If they are arrested, the victims of international
trafficking are prosecuted on an occasional, case-by-case
basis, for offenses such as possession of altered travel
documents.


D. (U) The GoG does not provide specific protection for
victims of trafficking beyond those available to all crime
victims or witnesses. As a general note (for all detainees),
prisons in Ghana are very overcrowded and suspects are often
detained for prolonged periods of time as a result of an
overloaded judiciary.


E. (U) The GoG does not have an adequate system in place for
victim interviewing to assist with the investigation and
prosecution of trafficking. Efforts to work with victims for
information-gathering and investigative purposes are hampered
by a lack of a formal communication systems between agencies
with different roles in the prevention, prosecution, and
protection stages.


F. (U) See para 21 D.


G. (U) The GoG does not provide specialized training for
government officials in recognizing trafficking and in the
provision of assistance to trafficked victims. However, it
has taken part in trainings conducted by the ILO. The GoG
does work with its embassies and consulates in other
countries on trafficking issues, although on a limited,
case-related basis (see para 20 F).


H. (U) Through the Department of Social Welfare, the
government is able to provide some counseling and shelter to
victims of trafficking. It also provides some start-up
assistance when trafficked children are repatriated to their
home communities.


I. (U) Several NGOs, both local and international, work with
trafficking victims. The International Organization for
Migration (IOM) took the lead in 2004 with its nationwide
project to rescue, rehabilitate, and reintegrate children who
had been trafficked (mainly from the south) to fishing
villages in the northeast along the Volta River. The IOM,
with GoG in-kind assistance (see para 18 G),provides
counseling and medical care to trafficking victims for two
months before assisting them back to their home villages.
Upon their return, the IOM provides micro-credit assistance
to parents to help prevent re-trafficking. The IOM also
provides support for one year with the children's school
feeds and school uniforms and supplies. The IOM project also
provides micro-credit assistance to fisherman who agree to
release the trafficked children, to enable the fisherman to
explore alternatives sources of income that would reduce the
reliance on cheap labor for their fishing work. As of March
2005, 544 children have been rescued through this project. Of
these, 430 have already been reintegrated in their home
villages. The remaining children were still in the
rehabilitation camp as of March 2005.

The African Centre for Human Development (ACHD),Save the
Children UK, Children in Need, Action Aid, Catholic Action
for Street Children, the Gender and Human Rights
Documentation Center, Catholic Relief Services, Street Girls
Aid, ILO/IPEC and UNICEF all work in the areas of child labor
and support for street children. These organizations, as
well as the University of Ghana's Center for Social Policy
Studies, conduct studies into trafficking as part of their
broader agenda, perform some rescue operations for street
kids, provide training and education for victims of
trafficking and abuse, and in some cases, assist with family
reunification. The ACHD project has met with some failure in
that many of the children they helped repatriate were
re-trafficked, as a result of minimal post-rehabilitation
follow-up.

--------------
Heroes
--------------


3. Post would like to submit the following two nominations as
heroes in the fight against trafficking-in-persons. Both
nominees have been vetted through post's Political office and
Consular CLASS system.

- ERIC APPIAH OKRAH, ILO/IPEC: Eric, a Ghanaian national, is
one of Ghana's foremost leaders in the effort to monitor and
combat trafficking-in-persons. In his capacity as the
National Program Coordinator for Combatting Child Trafficking
in West and Central Africa, Eric was highly instrumental in
coordinating the National Task Force's efforts to finalize
draft legislation for an anti-trafficking bill. He has worked
tirelessly, both publicly and behind the scenes with key
individuals in the government, to fine-tune the legislation
and to encourage its passage. Eric is actively engaged with
all players on the anti-trafficking front in Ghana - from the
smallest local NGO to the ministers for Women's and
Children's Affairs and Manpower, Youth, and Employment. He
has worked closely with the Attorney General's office to
clarify the language in the anti-trafficking legislation
throughout the past two years. In July 2004, Eric gave a
comprehensive briefing to USG officials visiting Ghana on the
nature and status of human trafficking in Ghana. He is widely
known in the NGO community as an expert on the subject, and
has applied his expertise to a number of NGO and government
programs and initiatives. In addition to his efforts on the
anti-trafficking front, Eric is also a lead interlocutor on
the child labor portfolio, which has some overlap with
trafficking issues in Ghana. In the past year, he has
traveled throughout Ghana conducting ILO child labor and
forced labor workshops and always endeavors to use these
workshops as an opportunity to raise awareness of child
trafficking.

- JOSEPH RISPOLI, IOM: Joseph, an American citizen, stands
out in the effort to rescue, rehabilitate, and reintegrate
trafficked children in Ghana. As the countertrafficking
program manager in Ghana, he has coordinated the effort by
IOM to identify source and destination villages involved in
child trafficking. Joseph has led the program to find
children who have been trafficked from the south to the
northeastern fishing villages along the Volta River. IOM's
Yeji fishing village project has enjoyed support from
community leaders, traditional rulers, district-level
government, and the central government in Accra largely due
to Joseph's ongoing efforts to sensitize and educate key
individuals about the problem of child trafficking. With the
support of his field staff, Joseph has made remarkable
inroads in sensitizing communities about trafficking, where
previously there was great resistance to changing this
entrenched 'cultural tradition'. Although he is based in
Accra, Joseph spends the majority of his time in the field,
actively reaching out to his project partners and monitoring
the children's status in the villages, at the rehabilitation
camps, and after their return to their home villages. He
views long-term evaluation of returned children's welfare as
a top priority. In July 2004, a team of visiting USG
officials witnessed first-hand the impact Joseph's hard work
has had on a community in the Central Region. The members of
this team were unanimous in their praise for the work that
Joseph has spearheaded through IOM. There is no other
individual in Ghana who works so closely with this issue in
the field who exhibits such persistence, patience, concern,
and focused effort in rescuing, rehabilitating, and
reintegrating trafficked children. Joseph is truly a hero in
the fight against trafficking-in-persons and serves as a
model to his IOM countertrafficking program colleagues around
the world.

--------------
Best Practices
--------------


4. (U) Post submits the following as a 'best practice' for
the 2005 TIP report:

"Involving Civil Society in Developing Legislation"

Ghana has served as a model for effective involvement of
civil society groups in developing and drafting its
anti-trafficking legislation. Since the National Task Force
was established in 2002 under the ECOWAS Protocol, the
Government of Ghana and a wide range of civil society groups
have met regularly to work on its primary task of drafting
anti-trafficking legislation to be submitted before
Parliament. This task was successfully completed in 2004. The
effort began with just a few interested individuals within
the government and civil society, but grew to incorporate
NGOs, international organizations, several ministries, and
media representatives. The National Task Force met regularly
throughout the drafting stages, inviting donor countries'
input to their seminars and workshops. The process was
transparent and allowed for press coverage of the ongoing
developments involving the draft legislation. Although the
involvement of greater numbers of people and organizations
may have slowed down the overall process, it resulted in more
informed, well thought-out legislation that adequately
answers the challenges 'on the ground'. It is also an
indication that Ghana's developing democracy provides an
effective framework for legislation to be devised with key
input from those working at the grassroots level. This effort
to bring all key players to the decision-making table was
remarkably inclusive, and it is a 'best practice' that other
countries who are in the early stages of drafting
anti-trafficking legislation can learn from. We further
commend the National Task Force for acknowledging the hard
work on the judicial and prosecutorial fronts that will
follow passage of the legislation.

--------------
Point of Contact
--------------


5. (U) Embassy POC for this report is PolOff Brad Stilwell;
telephone (233-21)-775-348, ext. 4239; fax (233-21)-776-008.
YATES