Category Archives: UN United Nations Fraud Corruption

Global Human Trafficking, Here at Home

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Pigs Fly, the UN Finally Admitted Global Sex Violence/Trafficking

Even CNBC is Sounding Alarm on Smuggling at Southern Border

 

Reps. Cohen, Kinzinger, Cárdenas and Wagner Introduce Bipartisan Human Trafficking Bill

June 9, 2016
Press Release

[WASHINGTON, DC] – Congressman Steve Cohen (D-TN), Congressman Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), Congressman Tony Cárdenas (D-CA) and Congresswoman Ann Wagner (R-MO) yesterday introduced H.R. 5405, the Stop, Observe, Ask and Respond (SOAR) to Health and Wellness Act. This bipartisan legislation would provide health care professionals at all levels training on how to identify and appropriately treat human trafficking victims. It is a companion bill to S. 1446, which was introduced by Senators Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND) and Susan Collins (R-ME).

“Human trafficking is a hidden crime that impacts hundreds of thousands of people across the U.S., and many of these victims end up in a health care setting while being exploited,” said Congressman Cohen. “Our bill aims to ensure health care professionals are trained to identify victims of human trafficking and provide them with critical, victim-centered health care.  Our bill also enables health care providers to implement protocols and procedures to work with victims, service organizations, and law enforcement so that victims can get proper support and perpetrators of human trafficking are brought to justice. I would like to thank Reps. Kinzinger, Cárdenas and Wagner for joining me in introducing this bill.”  

“It is critical that our health care providers are trained to recognize cases of human trafficking and have the proper procedures to best help those most vulnerable,” said Rep. Kinzinger. “I’m proud to be an original cosponsor of the SOAR Act and I believe this pilot program will have a significant impact towards identifying cases of human trafficking and helping more victims across the country from this disgusting crime.”  

“Human trafficking has grown into a large scale industry that is disproportionately geared towards women,” said Rep. Cárdenas. “This is just one of the many reasons why I did not hesitate to become an original cosponsor of the SOAR bill. Victims of trafficking suffer long-term effects, and with the introduction of new research, it is evident that the people who seek help can be identified and properly cared for by trained professionals. It is time to use this information in order to help stop the growth of the trafficking industry and facilitate the well-being of both survivors and victims.”   

“Education and awareness are critical in the fight to end human trafficking. This legislation will provide health care providers on all levels with the appropriate training and tools necessary to identify and report potential cases of human trafficking,” said Congresswoman Wagner. “With tens of thousands of victims being trafficked in the United States each year, I am happy to work with my colleagues across the aisle to introduce and quickly pass this legislation.”   

“Victims of human trafficking are hidden in plain sight – making those in captivity unrecognizable even to our most trusted professionals like doctors and nurses,” said Senator Heitkamp. “By implementing across the country the successes of health worker pilot training programs in North Dakota, my bipartisan bill with Sen. Collins would help provide the critical tools medical professionals need to recognize and protect victims of human trafficking. Today’s introduction of our bill in the U.S. House of Representatives is a critical step toward putting an end to human trafficking by identifying victims and getting them the support they need.” 

“Sex trafficking is a heinous crime that tragically affects every corner of America.  Human traffickers prey upon the most vulnerable, often homeless or runaway children,” said Senator Collins.  “Identification is a crucial, and frequently missed, step in helping victims and stopping these atrocities.  This bipartisan legislation would expand a successful pilot program at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to ensure that more health care providers have the training to identify, report, and treat these cases, which will help us shine a light on some of the darkest stories imaginable and protect victims of these detestable crimes.” 

The Stop, Observe, Ask and Respond (SOAR) to Health and Wellness Act supports efforts underway at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to combat human trafficking by directing the Secretary to establish a pilot program to be known as ‘Stop, Observe, Ask and Respond to Health and Wellness Training.’ While human trafficking victims are often difficult to identify, a reported 68 percent of trafficking victims end up in a health care setting at some point while being exploited, including in clinics, emergency rooms and doctor’s offices.  Despite this, out of more than 5,680 hospitals in the country, only 60 have been identified as having a plan for treating patients who are victims of trafficking and 95 percent of emergency room personnel are not trained to treat trafficking victims. The SOAR Act will help close the gap in health care settings without plans for treating human trafficking victims.

**** How bad is it?

BBC: Dubbed “the General”, Mered Medhanie is alleged to have led a multi-billion dollar empire which specialised in people-smuggling.

Undated handout photo, issued by the Kk'S National Crime Agency, of Mered Medhanie, dubbed "The General", one of the world's most wanted people smugglers, who has been arrested Mered Medhanie styled himself on the late Libyan leader Col Muammar Gaddafi 

A 35-year-old Eritrean, he came to public attention after being linked to the worst migrant disaster at sea – the deaths of 359 migrants in October 2013 after their boat sank near the Italian island of Lampedusa.

Canada-based barrister Christine Duhaime, who specialises in money-laundering legislation, said Mr Mered was suspected to be a ringleader of the people-smuggling network which stretched across Africa and Europe.

“He is notorious just for the fact that he controlled a lot of money and a lot of people,” she told the BBC’s Newsday programme.

“As kingpin, the amount of money that went through him is apparently in the billions.” More to the story here.

Report: Mexican Security Forces, Crimes Against Humanity

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The report is titled “Undeniable Atrocities: Confronting Crimes against Humanity in Mexico”. The report’s analysis relies on legal standards of the Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court, and which Mexico ratified in 2005.

The Open Society Slide Presentation is found here. Someone(s) at this George Soros organization really cares? Huh?

Mexican security forces committed crimes against humanity-report

Mexico’s drug war has resulted in the most violent period in the country’s modern history, with over 150,000 people killed since 2006

ThomsonReuters MEXICO CITY, June 6 (Reuters) – Mexican security forces have committed crimes against humanity, with mass disappearances and extrajudicial killings rife during the country’s decade-long drug war, according to a report released by rights groups on Monday.

The 232-page report, published by the Open Society Justice Initiative and five other human rights organizations, warned that the International Criminal Court could eventually take up a case against Mexico’s security forces unless crimes were prosecuted domestically.

“We have concluded that there are reasonable grounds to believe there are both state and non-state actors who have committed crimes against humanity in Mexico,” the report said.

Mexico’s drug war has resulted in the most violent period in the country’s modern history, with more than 150,000 people killed since 2006.

Consistent human rights abuses – including those committed by members of the Zetas drug cartel- satisfied the definition of crimes against humanity, the report said.

The authors recommended that Mexico accept an international commission to investigate human rights abuses.

A series of shootings of suspected drug cartel members by security forces, with unusually high and one-sided casualty rates, have tarnished Mexico’s human rights record.

“Resorting to criminal actions in the fight against crime continues to be a contradiction, one that tragically undermines the rule of law,” the report stated.

The unresolved 2014 kidnapping and apparent killing of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa teacher-training college was one of the most high-profile cases to have damaged Mexico’s reputation.

The report was based on documents and interviews over a nine-year period from 2006 to 2015.

It cited mass graves and thousands of disappearances, in addition to killings such as the shooting by the army of 22 suspected gang members in Tlatlaya in central Mexico, and similar incidents, as evidence of criminality in the government’s war against the country’s drug cartels.

Eric Witte, one of the report’s authors, recommended that the government look at the U.N. Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG) as an example for inviting an international investigative commission to bring cases in Mexican courts.

Evidence gathered by CICIG against former Guatemalan President Otto Perez played a key role in his resignation and eventual arrest last year.

The report criticised Mexico’s weak justice system. If atrocities continued without measures being taken to end impunity, the International Criminal Court could step in, said Witte, a former advisor at the Hague-based court.

“Unfortunately, Mexico might be one atrocity away from an international commission becoming politically viable,” Witte, who leads national trials of grave crimes for the Open Society Justice Initiative, told Reuters.

The Silent Heroes in Iraq, Saving the Girls

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(CNN)The bidding opens at $9,000. For sale? A Yazidi girl.

She is said to be beautiful, hardworking, and a virgin. She’s also just 11 years old.
 
This advertisement — a screengrab from an online marketplace used by ISIS fighters to barter for sex slaves — is one of many Abdullah Shrem keeps in his phone.
Each offers vital clues — photographs, locations — that he hopes will help him save Yazidi girls and young women like this girl from the militants holding them captive.

Shrem was a successful businessman with trade connections to Aleppo in Syria when ISIS came and kidnapped more than 50 members of his family from Iraq’s Sinjar province, a handful of the thousands of Yazidis seized there in 2014.

Tens of thousands of Yazidis fled their homes and clambered up Mount Sinjar in an attempt to escape the fighters; hundreds were massacred, while thousands of women and girls were abducted and sold into slavery.

Sold into sex slavery

Desperate — and angered at what he saw as a lack of support from the international community — he began plotting to save them himself, recruiting cigarette smugglers used to sneaking illicit produce in and out of ISIS territory to help his efforts.

“No government or experts trained us,” he explains when we meet in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq. “We learned by just doing it, over the last year and a half, we gained the experience.”
 The Shariya camp opened six months ago and now 4,000 tents line the dusty ground, providing shelter to thousands of refugees.

 Shariya camp with 4000 tents
 
So far, he says, his network has freed 240 Yazidis; it hasn’t been easy, or cheap — he’s almost broke, having spent his savings paying smuggling fees.
For those who venture into ISIS territory, the stakes are even higher — a number of the smugglers have been captured and executed by ISIS while trying to track down Yazidi slaves.
But Shrem insists the risks are worth it: “Whenever I save someone, it gives me strength and it gives me faith to keep going until I have been able to save them all.”
In some cases, the smugglers follow clues in the adverts or other tidbits of information they’re able to gather to find the Yazidis. In others, the hostages themselves reach out and plead for help, offering key details as to their location; a province or town they’ve overheard mentioned, or a local landmark they’ve been able to spot.
Once they manage to make contact, the prisoners are told when and where to go to meet the smugglers who wait for them in a nearby car. Depending on the circumstances of the rescue, it can take days or even weeks to get safely out of ISIS territory, switching from vehicle to vehicle, and waiting in safe houses.

Children as bomb-makers

Dileen (not her real name) is one of those rescued by Shrem and his team of smugglers.
She was separated from her husband when ISIS militants overran Sinjar province. The last time she saw him he was being marched away, hands up, with the other men from their village.
She and her children were taken to Mosul with the women and girls. “They separated the ones who were really pretty, and made us remove our headscarves to see the prettiest ones,” she says.

 
 
They were moved from place to place within ISIS territory: Mosul, Tal Afar, Raqqa, and finally to Tishrin where, she says, she was sold to an ISIS fighter, who raped her repeatedly.
“They forced me, and they threatened my children,” she says, recalling the five months she spent trapped in his home.
ISIS claims the Quran justifies taking non-Muslim women and girls captive, and permits their rape — a claim vociferously denied by Islamic scholars.
While Dileen was used as a sex slave, her daughter Aisha (not her real name), who is just seven years old, was forced to work late into the night, in the basement of their apartment building, assembling IEDs for ISIS.
“I used to make bombs,” says Aisha, quietly, playing with her hair. “There was a girl my age and her mother. They threatened to kill [the girl] if I wouldn’t go and work with them,” she told CNN.
“They would dress us in all black and there was a yellow material and sugar and a powder, and we would weigh them on a scale and then we would heat them and pack the artillery.”
An ISIS militant, she says, would then add the detonation wires.

Escapees ‘can’t forget’

The Yazidis have long suffered persecution, with many Muslims referring to them as devil worshipers. The ISIS storming of Sinjar created a humanitarian crisis as some fled into the mountains and were trapped without food or water.
Dileen was terrified Aisha would be blown up, or that — if the family was still being held captive by her next birthday — she too would be sold as a sex slave. So when the ISIS fighter she now belonged to left to go on a military operation, she spotted a chance to escape. She called Shrem and asked him to help them flee.
“We got to a phone with the help of another woman; we got in touch with Abdullah.”

  
Shrem’s phone number — memorized by his relatives before their phones were confiscated by ISIS — has been passed around among captured Yazidis, who know he will help them if he can.
“I begged him to hurry up and get us before my daughter turned eight, because they would take her.”
Shrem told her to meet someone from his network at a nearby mosque the following day, then spirited her and her children out of ISIS territory.

A year on from their rescue, Dileen — now living in a refugee camp in Iraqi Kurdistan — says she is still haunted by what they went through: “I can’t forget what happened.”
Her husband is still missing, feared dead, but Dileen insists that “for my children, I have to survive.”

DHS Approves/Admits 4700 Syrians + 7900?

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4,700 Syrian refugees approved resettlement to U.S.: Homeland Security chief

Reuters: The United States has approved 4,700 Syrian refugees who are awaiting resettlement to the country, while an additional 7,900 are awaiting security review, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said on Thursday.

Syrian refugee children play as they wait with their families to register their information at the U.S. processing centre for Syrian refugees, during a media tour held by the U.S. Embassy in Jordan, in Amman, Jordan, April 6, 2016. REUTERS/Muhammad Hamed

Johnson, speaking to a homeland security advisory panel at the Department of Homeland Security, was defending against critics who say the Obama administration is falling behind meeting its goal of bringing in 10,000 Syrian refugees into the country by the end of fiscal year 2016.

Meanwhile:

Sanctioned Syrian Official Invited To D.C. Event Delivers Outrageous Defense Of Assad

There is no moderate opposition and nobody is starving in Syria, according to Bouthaina Shaaban.

HuffPo: WASHINGTON — A panel discussion that had been billed as an effort to create a global alliance to defeat the so-called Islamic State spiraled downward Thursday into a tense two-and-a-half hour event dominated by a top Syrian official who has been sanctioned by the U.S. government. She insisted that her country’s brutal crackdown on its own people is just part of the war on terrorism.

Khaled al-Hariri/Reuters
Bashar Assad spokeswoman Bouthaina Shaaban was invited to speak via Skype despite facing U.S. sanctions.

“There is no such thing as moderate opposition,” Bouthaina Shaaban, spokeswoman for Syrian President Bashar Assad, said during the event hosted by an obscure group called the Global Alliance for Terminating ISIS/al-Qaeda (GAFTA).

In a lengthy pre-recorded speech, which was aired at the National Press Club event, Shaaban blasted Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Western countries for backing Syrian opposition fighters in her country’s civil war. She accused them of directly aiding both the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, and Jabhat al-Nusra, an al-Qaeda offshoot.

During a subsequent question-and-answer session, Shaaban sparred with reporters via Skype, dismissing accusations that the Assad regime had blocked humanitarian groups from delivering food to besieged areas of Syria and had aided ISIS by releasing its members from prison and purchasing oil from the terrorist group.

“It is a very fertile land. Nobody is starving in Daraya,” Shaaban said, despite well-documented reports of the Assad regime’s “surrender or starve” tactics in areas like Daraya and Madaya.

In 2011, the U.S. sanctioned Shaaban, along with Assad and a handful of other regime officials, in response to the Syrian government’s violent repression of its people. The sanctions froze any assets the officials had in the U.S. and prohibited Americans from providing “financial, material, or technological support” to them.

It is unclear whether GAFTA, a Florida-based nonprofit, violated the sanctions by hosting Shaaban electronically. Ghassan Mansour, GAFTA’s treasurer, claimed that the group did not know about the sanctions until the day before the event.

A Treasury spokeswoman declined to comment on the specific case, only vaguely suggesting that the arrangement could be problematic. “Transactions with designated persons are generally prohibited,” she told The Huffington Post.

GAFTA founder Ahmad Maki Kubba, speaking at the event, defended the invitation to Shaaban as part of an effort to hear from all parties involved in the fight against ISIS and claimed that the group has no allegiance to either side. But the Thursday discussion was decidedly one-sided, and there are indications that GAFTA itself is sympathetic to Assad and his allies.

The organization’s Facebook page contains numerous news stories that frame the Assad regime and its ally Russia in a flattering light. Mansour himself was previously accused by the U.S. Department of Justice of participating in a money-laundering operation to aid the Lebanese militia group Hezbollah, which has fought on behalf of Assad in Syria. Mansour denies the 2011 allegation.

“We are not associated with [Shaaban] or anybody,” he told HuffPost in a phone interview. “We’re trying to fight an evil. Is there sanctions against that?”

 

In the lead-up to the panel discussion, critics of the Assad regime accused GAFTA of providing a propaganda platform for a top-level Syrian official in violation of the spirit of the sanctions, if not the law itself.

“The point of sanctioning someone is to change their behavior, isolate them and force them to reconsider the actions they were taking. This is not in line with that,” one House Republican aide said of inviting Shaaban.

Mansour said his group has reached out to members of Congress but has had little luck securing meetings in Washington.

 

Others accused GAFTA of undermining the United Nations-led peace process by giving Assad’s spokeswoman a direct line to a U.S. audience. “She is regularly the one who speaks for the regime,” said Joseph Bahout, a visiting fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “She’s been propagandizing, denying the use of chemical weapons, denying massacres.”

Bahout rejected GAFTA’s argument that hearing from the Syrian regime at Thursday’s event was part of an effort to resolve the civil war.

“I’m sorry to be blunt, but this is the classical, usual bullshit used every time someone is trying to open a channel with the regime. If you want to negotiate with the regime, there are proper channels in Geneva,” Bahout said, referring to the U.N.-led talks.

 

The Syrian American Council, a U.S.-based group that has lobbied for more support for the Syrian opposition, said that it had pushed the National Press Club to remove Shaaban from the event, but as of Wednesday evening, had not heard back from Bill McCarren, executive director of the club. McCarren also did not respond to a request for comment from HuffPost.

“This is supposed to be about combating ISIS, and the Assad regime is directly responsible for not only fueling the rise of ISIS, but for supporting it financially through lucrative oil deals,” said Mohammed Ghanem, director of government relations for the Syrian American Council. “It’s unacceptable for a prestigious venue such as the National Press Club to be turned into a platform to spew propaganda.”