The 2016 TIP Report Holds Burma, Uzbekistan Accountable for Human Trafficking
Today the U.S. State Department released its annual report of the state of human trafficking around the world. The Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report ranks governments worldwide into one of three tiers based on their effort to combat and prevent human trafficking, forced labor, and other forms of modern slavery. At ATEST, we were watching this year’s report closely after last year’s release proved to be highly political with unjustified upgrades of Malaysia and Uzbekistan.
We’re pleased that the 2016 TIP Report rightly downgraded Uzbekistan, bringing it back to the lowest tier (Tier 3). Burma was also downgraded, reflecting their current lack of commitment towards fighting human trafficking and forced labor. We believe these were important downgrades and show an improvement over last year’s report. We are disappointed, however, that Malaysia remains on Tier 2 and that Thailand was upgraded to Tier 2 despite a lack of progress on the ground.
Read more of ATEST’s reaction here.
