Albania "Internal trafficking has not really been dealt by the states institutions"

10 Oct 2008 |

Sonila Danaj, author the recent report on the situation of child trafficking in Albania gives her comments on the impact of the report and on the declaration of the Prime Minister.

Yesterday, during the press conference for the presentation of the report, the Prime Minister of Albania, Mr Sali Berisha, who was saying that the reality of child trafficking in Albania goes far beyond the official statistics. What is your point of view about this declaration?

Sonila Danaj: Well I think that the report also shows that! The figures show certain numbers but these numbers are not the real numbers of children who have been trafficked. And why’s that? Because first of all, the institutions have the numbers of those who have been caught in situation of trafficking. (…)

So they can declare the people they have caught on the border by example, or those exploited in the streets. But they don’t have the overall number because being a criminal activity; it’s a hidden activity, so you cannot come out with definite final numbers. And the NGOs are also saying that! They say that we work with more children than actually are stated in the official statistics. This is related to the criminal aspect of trafficking, it tends to be hidden.

Considering especially for international trafficking, now there is a larger border control than it used to be in the nineties. So because of that, now the routes for trafficking children or for smuggling people in general are more complicated, more hidden and so it has become more difficult for the state institutions to identify children who are in a situation of being trafficked abroad.

Whereas internal trafficking has not really been dealt till this year by the states institutions. It is more related to poverty but not as a phenomenon of trafficking. So the civil society is the only one who have been working with street children and trying to encourage them to participate in projects, provide services, support them, even to prevent them from being trafficked or to remove them from a situation of trafficking. That’s why I suppose the Prime Minister said that figures are more serious than they appear in statistics.

This is the first report from BKTF, it’s a coalition of Albanian and international NGOs active in Albania. From your point of view, what is the added value of such coalition in the fight against the trafficking of children in Albania?

Sonila Danaj: The coalition is already 19 NGOs which means that these 19 NGOs working in the field of child trafficking are already coordinating their efforts and their projects in order to avoid overlapping but also to increase the service’s quality, and to offer it to more people. This coordination has led also to collaboration between parties, considering that some of them have similar targets and similar objectives, then they have started to collaborate with each other in mutual projects which has led of course to better services offered to a larger number of people.

Another positive aspect of the coalition is the fact that in the coalition, the different NGOs working for a long period of time in Albania now have a larger power of leverage. So their advocacy and lobbying by the state institutions have had a greater impact. They have been involved in the procedures for designing the new strategy against child trafficking for example, and they not only have given their suggestions but they have been invited to the working tables, and have helped the government give a better strategy and make corrections to the old strategy, and also offered their support for the different activities foreseen in this strategy.

Another important contribution of the coalition is continuity. Being already 19 NGOs, they have coordinated their efforts in an attempt to have continuity. So if a certain group of people are already provided with services of reintegration, then they can be helped by other people in order to continue and finally remove themselves from the trafficking situation. The same for the projects, if one particular NGO has started a project, then they have either collaborated with another one or another NGO has taken where they left and continued this project to a further stage. And in this way, prevention, protection and reintegration have been more successful than if each of these NGOs would have worked separately.