MANILA, Philippines - In a statement, Bureau of Immigration (BI) Commissioner General Ricardo David Jr welcomed the recently released ‘2011 Interim Trafficking in Persons' report. The report saw the Philippines removed from the Tier 2 Watchlist, where the nation had been ranked in 2009 and 2010.The Tier 2 Watchlist is for countries where the absolute number of trafficked people is increasing significantly. Being placed on this list indicates a government failure to combat human trafficking.
David said the country's improvement on the human trafficking scorecard was "a clear and encouraging sign that the Bureau of Immigration's relentless drive against trafficking has paid off, despite criticism that the bureau has been overzealous in doing its job".- David commended Immigrations personnel at Ninoy Aquino International Airport (NAIA) for doing a very
good job over the last several months, in stopping thousands of undocumented overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) who had fallen prey to illegal recruitment and human trafficking syndicates from leaving the country. - Based on the statistics on the period running from August to December 2010, immigration officers at NAIA and other airports stopped more than 27,000 passengers, most of them OFWs disguised as tourists, from leaving.
The combined efforts of all member agencies of the Inter-Agency Council Against Trafficking resulted in the conviction of 21 human traffickers from July 2010 to March this year.Philippine officials recently hailed a US State Department report indicating that significant progress had been made by the country in the campaign against human trafficking.
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