WITH HUMAN trafficking becoming an increasingly serious problem, the Serviço de Estrangeiros e Fronteiras (SEF), the national authority on migrations control, has launched an awareness campaign on Friday.
Não Estás à Venda, meaning you’re not for sale, recounts several stories of human trafficking and was released during a seminar held at the Centro Cultural de Belém, in Lisbon.
The event was attended by a large number of personalities from the SEF, the European Council, International Organisation for Migrations, several political and police departments from Portugal, Brazil and also the European Union.
To promote the campaign, staff members from the SEF in several cities in Portugal went outside to distribute flyers and inform people in the streets about this type of criminality.
According to the latest figures from the Organisation for Security and co-Operation in Europe (OSCE), about 1.2 million children are sold every year to agricultural, mining and sexual exploitation, which accounts for some 30 per cent of human trafficking in the world each year.
Portugal, which isn’t high on the list in terms of world numbers, was recently mentioned in a report from the US government.
Dated from last June, the Human Trafficking Report 2007 says that Portugal “is one of the destinations and passing by countries of human trafficking”.
The report also underlines the fact that “Portugal is ranking amongst the countries that are not respecting the minimum requirements to fight the phenomenon”, although it’s working to improve that situation.
To know more about the SEF, please visit: http://www.sef.pt/portal/V10/EN/aspx/page.aspx
Do you have a view on this story? Email: [email protected]
