U.S. Ambassador on combatting trafficking addresses
Vatican summit
(Vatican Radio) A Vatican
summit of legal experts from around the world opens on Friday to discuss ways
of combatting human trafficking and organised crime. The two day meeting has
been organised by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and is scheduled to
include an audience with Pope Francis and the signing of a final declaration.
Over a hundred judges,
magistrates, prosecutors, and representatives of legal organizations from some
20 different countries are sharing best practices from their experience of
working to fight trafficking, slave labour and the trade in human organs. In
particular they are exploring how they can better incorporate humanitarian
values into their legal systems, how to enhance judges’ appreciation of the
needs of survivors and how money confiscated from the traffickers can be
directed towards their victims.
Among those addressing the
opening session of the meeting is Ambassador Susan Coppedge, the
new U.S. Ambassador at Large for Monitoring and Combating Trafficking in
Persons. She talked to Philippa Hitchen about her own work in this field and
about her hopes for the Vatican conference…
Ambassador Coppedge begins by
praising the Vatican for convening this summit on sharing ways of improving the
prosecution of traffickers and bringing justice to their victims.
She explains how she began
her career “prosecuting polluters” at the U.S. government’s environmental
enforcement section. She then met individuals who’d been trafficked and “felt a
real calling” to represent those who don’t have a voice within the judicial
system, those who felt their families had abandoned them and society had
overlooked them.
The vulnerabilities of
victims
The ambassador talks about
the type of trafficking victims she worked with as “anyone who had
vulnerabilities”, including American kids who’d run away from home, as well as
Latin American, African and Asian women recruited into prostitution or domestic
servitude.
She notes that traffickers
tend to exploit those they know best because they understand “how to speak to
them” and how to threaten their families. Traffickers, she says, trade in lies,
in threats and when those don’t work they use physical violence.
Raising rights of girls
and women
The State Department’s
response to the problem, Ambassador Coppedge says, is based on educating the
public about what trafficking is and erasing the vulnerabilities of victims,
adding that “by raising the rights of girls and women everywhere you’re
decreasing their vulnerability to trafficking”.
Recounting some moving
examples of young survivors who were able to confront their traffickers, the
ambassador says she has been impressed by the resilience of young people .
Church plays vital role
She says the Church and NGOs
have a vital role to play, working at community level to educate people with a
message of caring for their fellow citizens. Pope Francis, she concludes, has
done “a remarkable job” in raising the issue of “the victimization of
individuals based on economic imbalances” and in raising the profile of the
trafficking problem on a worldwide scale.
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