Pat Rabbitte (Dublin South West, Labour)

I move amendment No. 2:

In page 4, between lines 34 and 35, to insert the following new section:

3.—The Minister shall promulgate a code of victim's rights in respect of victims of trafficking which shall address the following issues:

(a) protection of private life of victims;

(b) appropriate medical assistance to victims;

(c) secure accommodation;

(d) recovery and reflection period (minimum 30 days);

(e) temporary Residence permit (minimum 6 months);

(f) translation and interpretation facilities where necessary;

(g) access to counselling and information services, in particular, as regards

legal rights, in a language that can be understood;

(h) access to legal aid;

(i) right of access to education for children;

(j) right to access social welfare benefits as necessary;

(k) voluntary repatriation and return of victims;

(l) facilitating access to the asylum process;

(m) special protection measures for child victims;

(n) family reunification;

(o) right to work;

(p) right to access vocational training and education;

(q) compensation and facilitating legal redress against traffickers.

Most people who have taken time to inform themselves about this Bill welcome it as going a significant way to tackling the issue of trafficking. However, the same informed people also agree that the big defect in the Bill is an absence of the protection of victims' rights. There is not as much public knowledge about this as one might expect. The Minister took time out on Second Stage to set out very graphically the scale of human trafficking in today's global environment. In so far as statistics are available to the international organisations concerned, it is now claimed that human trafficking is the third most lucrative international criminal trade, after drugs and arms.

I was completely taken aback at the extent of the response to a recent television programme, drawing attention to this issue. People who never really thought about it did not appreciate that 800,000 people are being trafficked every year. Against that scale and background, it would be very naive to think that Ireland somehow escaped the attention of those who were involved in this lucrative, international criminal enterprise. We dealt with that on Second Stage, on Committee Stage and when we examined the Estimates of the Department and of the organisations working with people at the coalface of the trafficking problem in this jurisdiction.

The Minister has clearly made trafficking an offence, but he has made it plain that this Bill is purely a criminal law response and does not purport to go beyond that. We know that he speaks in an environment where we have not ratified the international instruments because of defects in the law as it stands. This Bill will advance us towards compliance, but it is not in itself sufficient. The major defect, identified by people who are concerned and knowledgeable in this area, is in the protection of victims. Unfortunately, the Minister has taken the position that that is not for this Bill and that he will address it to some extent in the immigration and residence Bill. We have consistently said that these are two entirely separate matters. The immigration and residence Bill is about a completely different phenomenon from that of trafficking. All the international instruments suggest that the care, protection, assistance and provision of services to victims ought to be in the trafficking Bill itself. The Minister has resisted that, which is a great pity.

I believe that this Bill will be undermined by the refusal to take on board the desirability of enshrining the protection of victims in the Bill. It is entirely unrealistic to expect victims to come forward to use the criminal law provisions if they do not have a measure of reasonable protection. That does not apply at the moment. We are mainly talking about young women who have been brutalised, who find themselves in an alien environment, who very frequently may not have good knowledge of the language and who are fearful of those who have got control of their lives. We expect them to come forward to make the criminal law provisions in this Bill effective. Unless we provide them with nurture and protection, it is less likely that they will come forward. That is the regrettable thing about the Minister's stance because otherwise, generally speaking, I support his Bill. I acknowledge that it is a big step forward, but I do not understand the almost ideological resistance in the Department to inserting in the Bill a charter for the protection of victims. I do not see why that is a big issue. The Minister will, in effect, say: "The Deputy now knows I have done this in the immigration Bill". In fact the Deputy does not quite know this because the Minister has dealt with the question of reflection and recovery in the immigration Bill, but that is all. In any event, the immigration Bill only refers to people from outside the EEA.

The main trafficking in Ireland is from within the European Union, from poorer countries including the new accession states. People from there are mainly those being trafficked into Ireland. It is more lucrative for those engaged in this criminal enterprise to go to Prague, Latvia or wherever and strike the deals that have come to light in recent times in terms of trafficking into London, other British cities and undoubtedly here.

The Minister will agree that the immigration Bill applies only to non-EEA nationals, but insist that the others are from EU member states and, as such, have the rights of EU citizens. That is true to a greater or lesser extent in terms of, for example, the labour laws. It is the case, however, in the anecdotal knowledge of every Member of this House, that the labour laws are not being particularly well enforced for some of the migrant labour here. There is a world of difference in the broad assertion that a young woman trafficked here from Lithuania is a citizen of the European Union, with attaching rights, and the actual circumstances of the person who has been trafficked. They need protection around them. They need to be proactively cared for if they are to heal, recover and be able to give evidence against those who trafficked them in the first instance.

The Minister has dealt with the recovery and reflection period and the question of temporary residence in the immigration Bill, but that is all. He has not done any of the other things that are listed in my amendment. I did not pluck these out of the sky, nor do I claim paternity of them. They are drawn from various international instruments that suggest best practice. Some of these are obvious and important, but they are not included either in this Bill or in the Immigration, Residence and Protection Bill. A citizen of Bulgaria or Romania does not have the right to work here, but how is a young woman who has been brutalised in this type of exploitation supposed to support herself while she is waiting for such a case to come to trial?

A number of issues are listed as regards medical and legal assistance, access to legal advice, accommodation and so on. They are all spelt out. The Department, while appearing to concede that we have been caught out and are not in line with international instruments and, therefore, should deal with the criminal law side of this issue, takes the position that otherwise Ireland is a civilised country and all of these matters can be addressed short of legislation. I have not seen anything tangible from the Minister that might indicate whether he intends to put administrative measures in place that will be resourced and provide the particular aspects of protection that I mention. Clearly, organisations working with people who have been trafficked want to see this in law. If the Minister has set his face against that, they want commitments from him on the Dáil record about what he proposes to do to ensure there is access to some administrative procedures that will provide these kind of services.

This is the big gap in the Bill. I genuinely have difficulty understanding the resistance to it. We are talking about a small number of people. The Minister refers to the number of people being trafficked here as 100 or more. Organisations working with them maintain it is a good deal more than that, and climbing. However, it is still a relatively small, finite number and I find it difficult to understand why we cannot offer these people protections under our law. It is plain that since the very poor economic areas of the European Union gained access to the Union, the phenomenon of young women either fleeing poverty to make a better life for themselves or being trafficked has been growing.

I instanced the case on Committee Stage which was published in a British Sunday newspaper recently involving a young woman from Lithuania, I believe, who only discovered when she arrived in London that she had been sold for €4,500 to an Albanian pimp. She found herself in circumstances where she was expected to have sex with men 15 or 17 times a day — in respect of which she got £10 a day. She had no knowledge when she left her home village that these were the circumstances in which she would find herself. Without the protective cloak that I am suggesting, it is very difficult to how she could get out of that situation and I ask the Minister, even at this 12th hour, to reconsider.

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