KATHMANDU, JUNE 28

Rights activists have urged the government to expedite efforts to amend almost a dozen laws to make them compatible with the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress, and Punish Trafficking in Person especially Women and Children (also known Palermo Protocol), a major international instrument to combat human trafficking.

Executive Director of Forum for Women, Law and Development Advocate Sabin Shrestha said although Nepal ratified the Palermo protocol in 2020, the task of amending domestic laws, including Passport Act, Immigration Act, Foreign Employment Act and Human Trafficking and Transportation (Control) Act to make them compatible with the Palermo protocol was yet to be completed. Shrestha said the Palermo protocol offered a global definition of human trafficking differentiating between human trafficking and human smuggling. He urged the signatory countries to include the definition in their domestic laws. He further said the Palermo protocol also defined labour exploitation as human trafficking, which Nepal was yet to include in its anti-trafficking laws. Shrestha said the Palermo protocol had not made any distinction between human trafficking and human transportation unlike Nepal's anti-human trafficking laws. 'As far as the existing Human Trafficking and Transportation (Control) Act is concerned, it only treats Nepal as a country of origin and not as a receiving or transit country. The recent cases show that Nepal is also being used as a receiving and transit country,' he argued. 'The existing laws have defined prostitution as human trafficking crime but voluntary sex work should not be defined as human trafficking offence.'

Advocate Bimala Khadka Darlami said the existing anti-human trafficking laws needed to be amended to protect the identity of victims. 'A victim who lodges FIR under anti-trafficking laws has to appear before the court to endorse the details of FIR and hence the court should consider the FIR as valid evidence even if the victim does not appear for deposition,' she argued. The Passport Act, she said, penalises those who fraudulently obtain passports but since the cases of human trafficking were different, foreign victims of human trafficking who are coerced, deceived and cheated by their perpetrators, should not be punished if the details of victims' passport are proved to be false. Darlami said Nepal needed to sign mutual legal agreements with other countries to effectively implement the Palermo protocol.

A version of this article appears in the print on June 29, 2023, of The Himalayan Times.