Albania The Police accuses the NGO-s for the Trafficking Statistics

December 1, 2007

Comment: This subject of this article is related to a very debatable issue. It is the issue of the inaccuracy of statistics of the victims of trafficking, provided by two main actors: the Albanian structures of police and the Albanian Civil Society, specifically the NGO-s dealing with trafficking in human beings. Police pretends that the number of the victims of trafficking is presented by the NGO-s as increasing continuously or remaining constant. On the other hand, NGO representatives pretend that Police does not report the real number of these victims. The debate took place at the premises of the General Directorate of Police.

Bringing a third perspective besides the ones presented above, the section “Fighting Organized Crime and Terrorism” of the annual Progress Report of the European Commission “Albania 2007 Progress Report”, SEC (2007) 1429, released in Brussels on 6.11.2007, related to the situation of the reforms Albania is undertaking on behalf of the Stabilization Association Agreement with EU, states that Albania is still a significant transit country and levels of sex trafficking of women and children (mainly from the Roma community) within the country have risen. Additionally, the Report prescribes that in 2006, only 20 out of 227 suspected or identified victims of trafficking were willing to testify against their traffickers, due to weak witness protection. The Progress Report also uses the term “suspected victim of trafficking” which would be the analogue of the term “presumed victim of trafficking” worked by BKTF Coalition.

Furthermore, taking into consideration the lack of a database and the incoherent definitions on the victims of trafficking, BKTF Coalition (All Against Child Trafficking) working group has drafted 4 legal definitions on the victims of trafficking. The actors that provide services for the victims of trafficking in Albania will use these legal definitions so that there is a standardization of the terminology and database during the process of collecting and reporting the data. This standardization might result in more compatibility on the statistics of the victims of trafficking provided by different sources that deal with this issue.

(This Press review is under the framework of EIDHR funded project, implemented jointly with CILSP Albania)