US report flags halving of Malta’s anti-trafficking budget

The Maltese government has halved its anti-trafficking budget for 2015 to €20,000, despite police having identified a higher number of trafficking victims.

In their annual human trafficking report, the US State Department argued that the budget was halved despite the increase in victims requiring care services and the need to train judges and law enforcement on working with victims.

The report states that police identified 18 trafficking victims in Malta between March 2014 and April 2015, an increase from seven in the previous period. None of the victims were Maltese nationals or minors, and ten of them were employees of Bulebel-based clothing factory Leisure Clothing, whose director is currently facing court charges of human trafficking.

The report states that the government demonstrated “mixed progress” in law enforcement efforts against human trafficking. It praised the prescription of four to 12 years’ imprisonment for guilty sex and labour traffickers as “sufficiently stringent” and noted that three of the five new trafficking cases that the government investigated during the reporting period involved labour trafficking – the first such investigations in Malta’s history.

However, it warned that law enforcement efforts were stymied by a lack of accountability for human traffickers, with Malta not having secured a trafficking conviction since that of Raymond Mifsud in 2012. 

“The slow pace of court proceedings hampered prosecutions relying on foreign victims to give testimony in court,” the report said, noting that the prosecution of a police officer for alleged involvement in the 2012 trafficking case remains pending due to an appeal of that conviction.

“Malta is a source and destination country for women and children subjected to sex trafficking and a destination for women and men subjected to labour trafficking,” the report said. “Female sex trafficking victims primarily originate from China, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Russia, and Ukraine. Women and children from Malta have also been subjected to sex trafficking within the country. Forced labor victims largely originate from China, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam. Women from Southeast Asia working as domestic workers, Chinese nationals working in massage parlors, and women from Central and Eastern Europe working in nightclubs represent populations vulnerable to exploitation.

“Maltese children in prostitution, including those with drug dependencies, are vulnerable to sex trafficking in Malta. The approximately 5,000 irregular migrants from African countries residing in Malta may be vulnerable to trafficking in the country’s informal labor market.”

It also noted that the government doesn’t offer trafficking-specific training for prosecutors and the judiciary as it does for police officers, and that the frequent turnover of vice unit investigators, who also serve as prosecutors, presents a challenge to authorities working to ensure all stakeholders receive specialized training.

The report warned that the government doesn’t consistently provide translation services to human trafficking victims testifying in court and that lawyers assigned to said victims lacked experience working with traumatized victims.

Moreover, it cited observers as stating that judges should be more accommodating to requests for closed hearings and video testimony to prevent re-traumatization of victims serving as witnesses.