Church Active in Anti-Trafficking Work

by Letters Editor · October 30, 2014

From Mike Pothier, research coordinator: Catholic Parliamentary Liaison Office

Image courtesy of www.endhumantrafficking.co.za

Colleen Bentley asks whether the Catholic Parliamentary Liaison Office (CPLO) has done any further work on human trafficking since it was addressed in a research paper in 2010.

The answer is that we are continually monitoring developments, and that we work together with a number of other Church-based organisations in doing so.

These include the Counter Trafficking in Persons Office, which is located at the SACBC head office, Khanya House, Pretoria (www.endhumantrafficking.co.za) and the Scalabrini Institute for Human Mobility in Africa, located in Cape Town (www.SIHMA.org.za).

In addition, the CPLO director, Fr Peter-John Pearson, serves with Archbishop Stephen Brislin on an international committee of Church leaders and police that focuses on this scourge.

Over the last few years we have held a number of roundtable discussions covering the question of human trafficking, both cross-border and within our own country, as well as wider issues concerning refugees, undocumented migrants, and unaccompanied migrant children. We make a point of inviting MPs and parliamentary researchers to these discussions and the latter, in particular, are regular attendees.

More work certainly needs to be done to engage directly with MPs, and we have already started a programme of meetings with individual members who are influential in key policy areas. One of these will be refugee rights, human trafficking and associated matters.

As for the question of monitoring the implementation of laws once they are enacted, this is something that we try to do as far as possible. Mostly, though, we rely on specialist organisations working in specific fields, such as those mentioned above, which are better placed to monitor how effectively these laws are being applied.