KUALA LUMPUR – Malaysia remains downgraded to Tier 3 of the United States State Department’s annual human trafficking report for the second year in a row, owing to the government’s failure to meet the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking.
The report, released today, also pointed out the failure of the government to make significant efforts to eliminate human trafficking, in view of the impact of Covid-19 on its anti-trafficking capacity.
“Despite the lack of significant efforts, the government took some steps to address trafficking.
“The government prosecuted and convicted some traffickers, adopted victim identification standard operating procedures (SOPs), continued to identify and provide some protection services to trafficking victims, and publicly released the results of a survey it funded on the prevalence of forced and child labour in the palm oil sector.”
Malaysia was placed on the Tier 2 Watchlist between 2018 to 2020 before dropping to Tier 3, the lowest tier, last year.
Despite this, the report stated that the government continued to conflate human trafficking and migrant smuggling crimes and did not adequately address or criminally pursue credible allegations from multiple sources alleging labour trafficking, including in the rubber manufacturing industry and palm oil sector, with the government owning 33% of the third largest palm oil company in the world.
“The government continued to rely on victims to ‘self-identify’ and did not implement SOPs to proactively identify victims during law enforcement raids or among vulnerable populations with whom authorities came in contact; thus, authorities continued to inappropriately penalise victims for immigration and prostitution violations.” – The Vibes, July 20, 2022
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