Ms Vija Busa:

I thank the committee for the chance to discuss this issue.

We greatly appreciate the decision made by Parliament to amend the Civil Registration Act by enacting the Civil Registration (Amendment) Bill 2014 in December because it is part of the package that would help to guard the slope. There were several recommendations from the General Assembly from the United Nations on amendments to the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill. I have not mentioned all the titles of the Bills. More laws will be passed by the Oireachtas and we look forward to their enactment very soon.

I thank the Irish authorities, Garda National Immigration Bureau and the Irish Naturalisation and Immigration Service for their close co-operation. I should mention that the problem does not apply only to Latvian women, but in the years 2009 and 2010, the women mostly came from Latvia. The situation has changed and as H.E. Dr. Gints Apals stated it is not only the Latvians who come to Ireland. We can deal with the issue only on a national level as we did by amending the Latvian criminal law in 2013. The law came into force in 2013 to tackle sham marriages by making it a crime to facilitate the application for residency rights. In January we also started the HESTIA project in co-operation with the European Commission and the six countries involved are Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Finland, Slovakia and Ireland. We greatly appreciate the Irish Immigrant Council, which joined this project, as well as the support of the Department of Justice and Equality.

This is a complex issue and will take a great deal to stop. It is not only about immigration risks, it is not only about addressing the evolving form of human trafficking but also about the security risks.