The Jerusalem Report, December 26, 2005
Israel’s legislature and judiciary have both moved to toughen up the country’s policy on trafficking in human beings. In the Knesset, a sweeping bill to widen the definition of trafficking passed a preliminary vote in mid- November. The Supreme Court, meanwhile, has extracted a pledge from State Attorney Eran Shendar to boost enforcement of the existing law against pimping. And in early December, Attorney General Menachem Mazuz said he could not rule out amendth the law to charge the clients of trafficked women.
Israel criminalized trafficking in women for purposes of prostitution five years ago in response to police assessments of a thriving sex trade — earning organized-crime rings up to $1 billion a year — fueled by the smuggling of women, mostly from the Former Soviet Union, over Israel’s porous border with Egypt. The new bill expands the definition of criminal action to include trafficking in human beings for purposes including forced labor, extraction of bodily organs, the birth of an infant to be sold for adoption, and sexual offenses. Written to bring Israeli law in line with updates to two U.N. treaties on which Israel is a signatory — the Convention against Transnational Organized Crime and the Convention on the Rights of the Child — the bill sets prison sentences of up to 16 years on traffickers, or 20 years if the victim is a minor, and allows confiscating property related to their crimes.
On the judicial track, the Supreme Court forced the state prosecution to set a date when it would begin taking a tougher line against pimping and trafficking. A year ago, summoned before the Knesset Sub-committee on Trafficking in Women to explain his office’s laxity in prosecuting pimps and other traffickers, Shendar promised a more aggressive policy once a bill allowing the police to close down brothels was passed. The law passed in March; when the policy change failed to materialize, an. NGO called AZTUM/Justice Works petitioned the Supreme Court to force the state attomey to honor his pledge. And pressed by the justices during a November 30 hearing, the prosecution undertook to begin applying that law within 60 days.
“The court has sent the state attorney a clear message that there’s no excuse for ignoring such appalling exploitation,” says Yedida Wolfe, a lawyer with the Task Force on Human Trafficking (TFHT), a joint endeavor of ATZUM/Justice Works and the Kabiri-NevoKeidar law firm, which does pro-bono work for NGOs engaged in public causes. The court’s action, she adds, means that “beginning in February the authorities should finally be directed to investigate and prosecute pimps.”
The TFHT is also pressing for more stringent measures along the Egyptian border, through which 99 percent of trafficked women — up to 3,000 a year, according to army estimates — are still being smuggled into Israel. Although the police claim to have made great strides in shutting off this area, “when Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz visited the border at the end of November;’ says Levi Lauer, the director of ATZUM/Justice Works, “they declared that it would cost 3 billion shekels [$645 million] and take three years to seal it hermetically.”
INA FRIEDMAN