Crucial legislation introduced but others still lacking
Kaieteur News
August 6, 2004
AT last Guyana has tabled legislation to deal with the issue of Trafficking in Persons (TIP). Of course, we, like so many other countries, never considered the issue of trafficking in persons because we knew that given our situation, people would always be exploited for the purposes of labour.
It is no secret that people travelled to the interior regions of this country to recruit girls ostensibly for work in restaurants and hotels. We knew this, and should the girls turn to prostitution we always thought that they did so voluntarily. That is because we do not have the resources to visit hotels to constantly interview the workers.
Of course, whenever these workers found that their pay was inadequate they would seek the services of the Ministry of Labour. At this point, the Chief Labour Officer, after investigation, would announce that investigations, if founded, revealed that the given work place was paying wages that are lower than the stipulated minimum wage.
An order would be issued and the people would be paid retroactively. We were also aware that children worked in our rice fields but we never saw it as child labour. Many of us from the rice growing regions of this country took for granted the many families that lugged the young children to help reap rice. These families found it cheaper than to hire help, especially at a time when the money paid per bag of paddy barely covered the overhead expenses. This has been the case for decades when rice harvesting was not even mechanised. Parents took their children out of school and had them working in the rice fields. Some even loaned their children to neighbours. The authorities never considered that child labour.
However, the international community is taking a look at these things. They had people investigating the situation here, as they did in other countries and they found out that we had no legislation to protect the hapless from being forced into unwanted employment. They placed us in Tier Three, the lowest possible rating and threatened us with sanctions.
We have raced to correct the situation. We have tabled the necessary legislation and it likely that we would avoid the sanctions. With the threat of the sanctions looming over our head, we learnt that the international community could bar our exports and actually prevent others from shipping goods to us. Further, given its influence with the International Financial Institutions, the United States could have blocked loans we sought. And we can all imagine the state we would have been in with the curtailment of the loans. This had happened to us during the reign of Forbes Burnham.
The absence of needed loans caused the collapse of the hydroelectric project that offered so much hope to our country way back then. Similarly, the Mahaica-Mahaicony-Abary Agricultural Development Authority ground to a halt because the international community withheld funding.
The international pressure gave rise to such local productions as salt fish, eschallot, increased vegetable and legume production and many other things that we once depended on our foreign providers. But that was one era. Times have changed.
Should we be subjected to a withholding of funds, then there is precious little we could do except to expect riots and mayhem in the streets. So, we are now seeking to have laws in place to enable the authorities to prosecute anyone found trafficking in people. What is amazing, however, is that while we hasten to have the necessary laws in place for trafficking in persons, simply because we want to avoid international sanctions, we are ignoring equally critical laws.
For example, with the advances in technology, we have no legislation to deal with computer fraud, hacking, and the use of information provided by a lie detector machine. We are also hopeless when it comes to the use of evidence linked to DNA. Our laws simply do not allow us to use DNA evidence in court. Yet, given that DNA forms crucial evidence in other parts of the world and given that we cannot escape the impact of the international community, we cannot help but wonder at the apparent reluctance to have such crucial legislation in place.
Perhaps, we should seek to have another foreign power threaten us with some sanction unless such legislation is in place in he same way a foreign power threatened us to have legislation regarding trafficking in persons.