The political folly of dodging responsibility in Japan, Five books about Japan that are perfect for foodies. Japan’s 2014 Action Plan to Combat Trafficking in Persons vowed to crack down on illegal employment by implementing a human trafficking database and … Employees of two foreign airlines are involved in human trafficking from Bangladesh: police Senior Correspondent, bdnews24.com Published: 01 Dec 2020 08:04 PM BdST Updated: 01 Dec 2020 … Sorry, but your browser needs Javascript to use this site. Unlike in prior years, the government did not disaggregate information on conferral of residential benefits by type; authorities reported granting five foreign trafficking victims “special permission to remain in Japan” after overstaying their visas, as well as issuing unspecified changes in residency to seven additional trafficking victims (one long-term and eight short-term visas in 2018; two and 16, respectively, in 2017). In its annual Trafficking in Persons Report, the State Department placed Japan in Tier 2, after the country earned the highest classification for two consecutive years through 2019 in the four-tier list. The “Act on Regulation and Punishment of Activities Relating to Child Prostitution and Pornography and the Protection of Children” criminalized engaging in, acting as an intermediary for, and soliciting the commercial sexual exploitation of a child and prescribed penalties of up to five years’ imprisonment, a fine, or both. The Ministry of Justice (MOJ) reported “identifying” an additional four suspected traffickers without prosecuting them. The act also criminalized the purchase or sale of children for the purpose of exploiting them through prostitution or the production of child pornography, and it prescribed a maximum penalty of 10 years’ imprisonment. Highly organized commercial sex networks target vulnerable Japanese women and girls—in many instances those living in poverty or with cognitive disabilities—in public spaces such as subways, popular youth hangouts, schools, and online, and subject them to sex trafficking in commercial sex establishments, small musical performance venues, retail spaces, and reflexology centers, often through debt-based coercion. Japan to halt all business travel in new step to curb COVID-19, Japan bars entry for new arrivals and business travelers due to new COVID-19 strains, Another new coronavirus variant found in Japan, State of emergency expanded to seven more prefectures, Defend, dominate, deny: Declassified U.S. strategy shows vision for Indo-Pacific. However, none of these criminal referrals was for labor trafficking crimes, despite repeated attempts by service provision NGOs to draw attention to specific allegations of forced labor occurring within TITP worksites. Faith-based or­gan­i­sa­tions and oth­er agen­cies are us­ing their le­git­i­mate fronts across the world to con­duct il­lic­it ac­tiv­i­ties, in­clud­ing hu­man traf­fick­ing. The new regime reportedly permitted qualifying individuals already participating in the TITP to switch their visas to the newly created categories, allowing them to extend their stay in Japan and change jobs within the same sector. Traffickers also transport victims from elsewhere in the region through Japan before exploiting them in onward destinations, including East Asia and North America. This was especially true for Vietnamese participants, who constituted the highest proportion of TITP trainees. During the reporting period, the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare (MHLW) provided funding via the Tokyo Prefectural Government to an NGO to optimize their online presence for youth sex trafficking victims searching for shelter and protection services, doubling the NGO’s online contact with victims seeking care. Some Japanese TITP employers forced participants to remit portions of their salaries into mandatory savings accounts as a means to prevent their abscondment and retain their labor. Entities located in a county with a population of 500,000 or less must report human trafficking data by August 1, 2021. Contrary to definitional standards under the 2000 UN TIP Protocol, authorities did not consider children to be victims of sex trafficking unless the sex acts were mediated by a third party, likely preventing hundreds of children from formal designation. One trafficker received only a fine of 500,000 yen ($4,610), two received suspensions without fines, and three received suspensions with fines ranging from 200,000 to 300,000 yen ($1,840 to $2,760). In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever.By subscribing, you can help us get the story right. Despite the existence of these services, international organizations and NGOs reported most foreign trafficking victims had limited or no access to other government-provided social services from which legal resident victims could benefit. The good news is that Japan is taking positive steps to address these problems. TITP employers place many participants in jobs that do not teach or develop technical skills, contrary to the program’s stated intent; others place participants in jobs that do not match the duties they agreed upon beforehand. The COVID-19 pandemic created new risks and challenges to victims of trafficking (VoTs) and survivors of trafficking, as well as having exacerbated the vulnerabilities of … Traffickers also transport victims from elsewhere in the region through Japan before exploiting them in onward destinations, including East Asia and North America. U.S. downgrades rating of Japan's efforts against human trafficking KYODO NEWS - Jun 26, 2020 - 06:59 | All , World , Japan The United States on Thursday downgraded its assessment of Japan's efforts to meet minimum standards for the elimination of human trafficking, citing concerns over the abuse of labor migrants working in the country. As reported over the last five years, human traffickers subject Japanese and foreign men and women to forced labor and sex trafficking, and they subject Japanese children to sex trafficking. The Labor Standards Bureau (LSB) also conducted on-site inspections of more than 9,000 TITP work places but did not report additional information on corrective measures; some of these likely overlapped with the aforementioned OTIT inspections. Some provincial law enforcement officials noted that Japan’s unusually low age of consent, 13, further complicated efforts to formally identify children exploited in commercial sex as trafficking victims. Employers require many migrant workers to pay fees for living expenses, medical care, and other necessities, leaving them vulnerable to debt-based coercion. The government reported allocating more than 3.5 million yen ($32,250) for sheltering trafficking victims, compared with 3.4 million yen ($31,330) in 2018, and 3.5 million yen ($32,250) for male victims alone in 2017. Some participants reported the OTIT and the LSB were unresponsive to their request for mediation when their employers suddenly changed or terminated their contracts. In practice, interagency stakeholders followed disparate, often insufficient victim identification procedures—especially among child sex trafficking victims and migrant workers. The government reported arresting and initiating investigations into 39 individuals for 57 alleged crimes related to trafficking in 2019—including at least 15 men for alleged sex trafficking and four men and one woman for forced labor that may have involved corollary sex trafficking—compared with 39 cases in 2018 (unreported in 2017; 44 in 2016). NPA officials also reported consulting an IOM-developed handbook to identify and refer victims to available protective services. Courts newly prosecuted 32 individuals during the calendar year, compared with 34 individuals in 2018 and 26 in 2017, leading to 17 convictions–a decrease compared with 27 convictions in 2018 and 23 in 2017; the remaining cases were pending trial at the end of the reporting period. MHLW maintained a general counseling hotline for foreign workers in multiple languages, but it was not trafficking-specific; it reported fielding 1,950 calls from TITP participants, but it was unclear how many featured trafficking allegations (2,197 calls in 2018). MOJ issued regulations requiring employers to compensate these workers at a rate equal to or greater than Japan’s minimum wage in 2018. Japan ratified the 2000 UN TIP Protocol on July 11, 2017. Authorities again failed to identify a single trafficking case in the Technical Intern Training Program (TITP) despite persistent reports of forced labor among labor migrants working in Japan under its auspices. The availability and quality of victim services varied according to prefecture-level officials’ relative experience with trafficking cases. Authorities continued to take some law enforcement action against child sex trafficking in Joshi kosei or “JK” businesses—dating services connecting adult men with underage high school girls—and in coerced pornography operations, but for the second consecutive year they did not provide data or case specifics. NGOs claimed courts set prohibitively high evidentiary standards for forced labor cases involving foreign victims, including overreliance on physical indicators of abuse in lieu of evidence supporting psychological coercion, thereby stymying appropriate law enforcement action. • Aggressively investigate, prosecute, convict, and punish Japanese citizens who engage in child sex tourism overseas. The government identified 12 women and girls forced to work as “hostesses,” some of whom may have also been subjected to sex trafficking (three in 2018), and 35 female sex trafficking victims (20 in 2018; 31 in 2017; 37 in 2016), including at least five children. Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube. 08 december 2020 — health impact of human trafficking: healing at the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the palermo protocol (15 november 2020) 16 february 2021 — international prosecution of human trafficking 13 april 2021 — demand as root cause for human trafficking — the role of consumers in preventing and combating ht the program is available here. Washington – The United States on Thursday downgraded its assessment of Japan’s efforts to meet minimum standards for the elimination of human trafficking, citing concerns over the abuse of migrants working in the country. However, some NGOs alleged the physical conditions and services in these facilities were poor, overly restrictive, and insufficient to provide the specialized care required for trafficking victims. Authorities continued to advertise the multilingual emergency contact hotline number at local police and immigration offices, through NGOs, and in consultations with source countries’ governments. Organized crime syndicates posing as immigration brokers also lure these families to Japan with deceptive job offers, and then subject the women to forced labor and sex trafficking in the nightlife industry. The government continued to fund a program through an international organization to provide counseling, temporary refuge, social reintegration, and repatriation services to trafficking victims; however, it significantly reduced the relevant budgetary allocation during the reporting period. • Enhance victim screening to ensure victims—including children exploited in commercial sex without third party facilitation, migrant workers under the TITP program, and migrant workers entering Japan under the new visa regimes—are properly identified and referred to services, and not detained or forcibly deported for unlawful acts traffickers compelled them to commit. NPA also ran a general Japanese language hotline through a private entity, but it did not report the number of calls received or identify any potential trafficking cases through the use thereof (295 potential cases among more than 14,500 calls in 2018; 433 cases among over 19,000 in 2017). These efforts included identifying more victims than the previous year; funding a service provider organization to implement an innovative and highly effective online outreach program; and increasing on-site inspections of businesses employing migrant workers. Traffickers keep victims in forced labor or forced commercial sex using debt-based coercion, threats of violence or deportation, blackmail, confiscation of passports and other documents, and other psychologically coercive methods. The National Police Agency (NPA) reported instructing police precincts nationwide to enhance investigations into TITP abuses, and it established an information-sharing mechanism with OTIT to facilitate this cooperation. Traffickers use fraudulent marriages between foreign women and Japanese men to facilitate the entry of women into Japan for sex trafficking in bars, clubs, brothels, and massage parlors. The TITP reform law mandated the MHLW approve work plans outlining living conditions, working hours, and other factors developed jointly by incoming TITP participants and their employers; as of January 2020, authorities reported having approved over 300,000 of these plans. The government did not report statistics on arrests or prosecutions of cases involving “children in prostitution.” In previous years, authorities processed hundreds of such cases without formally identifying them as trafficking crimes (more than 700 cases involving nearly 600 suspects in 2018; 956 in 2017). However, for the second consecutive year, the government did not report to what extent it implemented this for trafficking cases during the reporting period. The government maintained memoranda of cooperation (MOC) with Bangladesh, Bhutan, Burma, Cambodia, India, Laos, Mongolia, Pakistan, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam, as well as a newly signed MOC with Indonesia, affirming it would accept TITP trainees only from state-approved organizations that would not charge participants “excessive fees” known to place workers in high debt. Sponsored contents planned and edited by JT Media Enterprise Division. Cases of forced labor occur within the TITP, a government-run program originally designed to foster basic technical skills among foreign workers that has effectively become a guest-worker program. Temporary, long-term, and permanent residence benefits were available to foreign victims who feared the repercussions of returning to their countries of origin. Despite these efforts, contacts noted an acute need for additional training to address the lack of awareness among key law enforcement officials and judicial stakeholders. The Global Slavery Index 2018 estimates that on any given day in 2016 there were 37,000 people living in conditions of modern slavery in Japan, a prevalence of 0.3 victims of modern slavery for every thousand people in the country. Although there were no reported cases of forced labor within this system in 2019, observers continued to express concern that it would engender the same vulnerabilities to labor abuses, including forced labor, as those inherent to the TITP, and that oversight measures were similarly lacking. In October, police arrested a Japanese man suspected of engaging in child sex tourism in Laos in 2017 under “child prostitution” charges, but the case appeared to involve child pornography, and they did not provide further information on the status or outcome of those charges. But critics say there are suspected abuses of such workers, including unpaid wages and illegal overwork. Monday, January 11th, is National Human Trafficking Awareness day and one local community is bringing attention to a crime that often that’s … Washington – The United States on Thursday downgraded its assessment of Japan’s efforts to meet minimum standards for the elimination of human trafficking… Unlike in previous years, authorities did not report how many such operations they identified or shuttered for violating the terms of the ordinances (137 identified and none closed in 2018; 114 identified and 14 closed in 2017), nor did they report arresting any individuals alleged to have been in engaged in criminal activities surrounding the JK business (69 arrested in 2018). Through this program, 14 foreign victims received repatriation assistance (five in 2018; seven in 2017; 23 in 2016). U.S. downgrades Japan on human trafficking due to trainee program. Without accurate data on the number of human trafficking incidents, victims, and offenders in the state, Texas cannot efficiently dedicate resources to anti-trafficking efforts. Authorities relied on formal manuals instituted by an Inter-Ministerial Liaison Committee in 2010 encouraging government bodies to develop broad protection measures for trafficking victims. Although there were no specific reports in 2019, in previous years, authorities arrested some child victims in connection with their trafficking situations; service provision NGOs believed enduring definitional discrepancies continued to leave child victims at risk of penalization. Authorities stated they continued to identify and provide unspecified protection services to “children in prostitution”—a form of sex trafficking—but did not report relevant data, unlike in previous years (544 children identified in 2018; 654 in 2017; 518 in 2016). The government continued to distribute posters and brochures in transportation hubs and to travelers warning that Japanese citizens could face prosecution if suspected of having engaged in child sex tourism overseas. An official website of the United States government, Office of Small and Disadvantaged Business Utilization, Office of the U.S. Traffickers subject male and female migrant workers, mainly from Asia, to conditions of forced labor, including at companies participating in Japanese government-run programs. Since 2000, the United States has actively moved to combat human trafficking, and Japan did not fare well in the annual Trafficking in Persons Report. Interagency stakeholders relied on disparate, ineffective identification and referral procedures, leading to issues with proper screening and protection of victims. The government decreased law enforcement efforts. Seven major prefectures maintained ordinances banning “JK” businesses, prohibiting girls younger than 18 from working in “compensated dating services,” or requiring “JK” business owners to register their employee rosters with local public safety commissions; one additional municipality adopted these ordinances in 2019. Authorities reportedly continued to fine persons convicted of the latter without incarcerating them, particularly first-time offenders; civil society experts asserted this leniency was permissive of continued commission of the crime. • Establish formal channels allowing all foreign workers to change employment and industries if desired. • Increase efforts to identify male victims of sex trafficking and forced labor. Good news about human trafficking in Japan. Civil society organizations reported that reliance on this series of overlapping statutes continued to hinder the government’s ability to identify and prosecute trafficking crimes, especially for cases involving forced labor with elements of psychological coercion. Date. Some transgender youth seek employment in unregulated urban entertainment districts as a means of financing their gender-affirming care and are subsequently exploited in commercial sex and possibly forced labor. The government continued to provide training on investigative methods and victim identification for police officers, prosecutors, judges, and immigration bureau officials.. • Reduce migrant workers’ vulnerability to debt-based coercion by amending relevant policies to eliminate the imposition of all worker paid recruitment and service fees. The number of victims and incidents is taken from several different data sources, but none are complete. Coordinator for the Arctic Region, Bureaus and Offices Reporting Directly to the Secretary, Office of the Coordinator for Cyber Issues, Office of the U.S. Countries with poor human rights records including China, Iran, Myanmar, North Korea, Russia, Syria and Venezuela remained on Tier 3, the lowest level of the rating system which also includes a Tier 2 Watch List. In a departure from prior years, the Immigration Services Agency did not report data from its own process for notifying TITP organizations of misconduct (more than 100 employers notified in 2018, leading to approximately 170 corrective notifications), and the MOJ did not report how many organizations it banned from receiving interns in 2019 (over 100 in 2018). The government maintained insufficient efforts to protect victims, including by consistently failing to formally identify victims of trafficking within the TITP and among children in commercial sexual exploitation. The government has never identified a forced labor victim within the TITP since its inception, nor during the tenure of its predecessor organization founded in 1993, despite substantial evidence of trafficking indicators. Authorities also established a new consultative mechanism with Japan’s aviation industry to train flight attendants on victim identification and referral to law enforcement, but they did not provide information on its implementation. Some groups posing as model and actor placement agencies use fraudulent recruitment techniques to coerce Japanese men, women, boys, and girls into signing vague contracts and then threaten them with legal action or the release of compromising photographs to force them to participate in pornographic films. Posted at 18:42 5 Jun 2020 18:42 5 Jun 2020 Man jailed for trafficking women from Brazil Mark Viner admitted two counts of human trafficking and one of keeping a brothel in Cheltenham. According to the 2004 report, Japan was ranked as a Tier 2 Watch List country. The S.C. Human Trafficking … According to available data, only three of the convicted traffickers served prison time, a decrease compared with nine in 2018 and five in 2017; one received a 10-month prison sentence, one received an 18-month prison sentence and a fine of 800,000 yen ($7,370), and one received a sentence of two and a half years’ imprisonment. Entities located in a county with a population of more than 500,000 must report human trafficking data by August 1, 2020. “JK” bar owners may subject some underage boys and girls, including LGBTI youth, to forced labor as hostesses and club-promoters. It produced its fifth annual report on government actions to combat trafficking and tracked measures against the stated goals of its 2014 anti-trafficking action plan. 2018 ; seven in 2017 the graying country that has taken a stance. 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