Sri Lanka had failed to fully comply with the minimum standards to eliminate human trafficking, a latest US State Department report on human trafficking has noted.

The Trafficking in Persons 2014 report released on Friday by the US Secretary of State John Kerry has placed Sri Lanka on a Tier 2 Watch List – a classification for countries whose governments do not fully comply with the Trafficking Victim Protection Act (TVPA)’s minimum standards, but are making significant efforts to bring themselves into compliance with those standards.

“The government continued modest prevention efforts including updating its national action plan, holding monthly inter-ministerial meetings and launching awareness campaigns. Despite these measures, the government failed to demonstrate evidence of increasing overall efforts to address human trafficking over the previous reporting period,” the report states in its references to Sri Lanka.

It also notes that the Sri Lankan authorities have failed to convict a single trafficker under its Trafficking Statute for the third year in a row.

“As in 2012 and 2011, Sri Lankan courts did not convict any traffickers under Article 360(c) in 2013, though one court convicted three defendants under Article 360(c) for baby-selling. Authorities also convicted 12 traffickers under the procurement statute; all but one of them received a suspended sentence.”

It has been noted that the government’s dependency on procurement charges and absence of prosecutions are results of an ‘an inability or unwillingness on the part of police to thoroughly investigate potential human trafficking cases for elements of force, fraud, or coercion.’

The 2014 Trafficking in Persons report has also shed light on the inadequacy of victim protection provisions for both male and female victims.

“Provisions for victim protection were inadequate, as the government provided no specialized services to male victims, incarcerated sex trafficking victims, and mixed child victims with criminals in state institutions. Authorities did not approve guidelines for victim identification and protection that were developed in 2012, though some agencies began implementing them anyway. However, authorities rarely enforced labor recruitment regulations and increasingly denied young Sri Lankan women the legal permission to migrate for work, increasing the likelihood that women would use unregulated recruiters who are more likely to exploit migrant workers,” the report states.

It has also noted the government employees’ suspected complicity in trafficking offenses; allegations of Police and other state sector officials accepting bribes to permit brothels to operate – some that exploited trafficking victims.

“Many recruitment agencies were politically connected. Some sub-agents worked with Sri Lankan officials to procure forged or modified documents, or real documents with false data, to facilitate travel abroad. Despite these reports of complicity, the government did not report any investigations or prosecutions of government employees suspected of being complicit in human trafficking,” it notes.(Lakna Paranamanna)