The International Organization for Migration has found that 71 percent of migrants travelling from North Africa to Europe have experienced exploitation and trafficking. The results are based on 9,000 survey responses.
18 October 2016
DEUTSCHE WELLE — According to a damning UN report released on Tuesday to coincide with UK Anti-Slavery Day, nearly three quarters of all migrants moving from North Africa to Europe have experienced serious abuse, exploitation and practices that could amount to human trafficking.
The survey, conducted by the International Organization for Migration (IOM), quantifies for the first time the alarming scale and frequency of the increasingly prevalent exploitative practices, including instances of forced labor that may amount to modern slavery.
Medical staff check a refugee upon arrival at Munich’s main train station in September 2015
The IOM spent 10 months interviewing over 9,000 migrants at arrival ports such as Italy in order to derive these latest figures.
Clea Kahn, Humanitarian Advocacy Manager at the British Red Cross said: “The horrific experiences of people making this journey – regardless of where they started it or why – must be acknowledged and addressed. It is a humanitarian crisis in its own right.”
A perilous journey
Nearly half of the migrants surveyed (49 percent) indicated that during the course of their journey, they had been held in a location against their will in circumstances that amounted to kidnapping for ransom.
The overwhelming majority of these reports came from Libya, which is currently in the grip of an unstable civil war. […]
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