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Last Wednesday, the European Commission outlined its new migration policy at a news conference held in Brussels, Belgium. The new policy will “enforce rules on asylum as border countries struggled to deal with unprecedented numbers of people trying to reach the continent, fleeing conflict or poverty in the Middle East and Africa.” The EU has been silent about this issue, but recently decided to take responsibility and take action to implement their new policy along with the existing ones that haven’t been applied properly. The new agenda for refugee’s settlement would cost about 50 million euros ($56 million) projected for 2015-16. The Commission emphasized the need to share responsibility amongst the EU members, with the exception of United Kingdom, Ireland, and Denmark, to remove the burden from the two most popular destinations, Italy and Greece.

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For more information about CHTCS and how we can help your organization, please contact us.

In late April, the Bangalore branch of the International Justice Mission (IJM) was invited by Indian officials to join an operation to find close to 60 suspected victims of human trafficking that had been reported missing by relatives from the Indian state of Orissa. Indian police officials believed that the missing relatives from Orissa were being held in two targeted brick kilns, however when IJM and the Indian police arrived, there was no one to be found. In what appears to be a stroke of luck, “the official in charge from Orissa instead decided to enter a few nearby brick factories and make sure the workers there were rightfully employed” said IJM Bangalore’s Esther Daniel. “What we found shocked us. Dozens of people were inside, afraid and desperate to leave.”

IJM and the local police took the women, children, and men to a nearby community center to provide them with care and determine whether the missing Orissa families were among the rescued. In the days following, 7 of the families reported missing from Orissa were found. Four of the families had run away from the brick kiln the day of the rescue operation, while three other families were forced to board a train back to Orissa the morning before by the factory’s owner, after he was most likely tipped off about the looming rescue operation. “The families shared how they had been forced to work up to 12 hours a day, seven days a week. They were isolated from any kind of support network, hundreds of miles away from their home state. The rigid rules were enforced with violence and threats.”

Thanks to IJM and the Indian police officials, a total of 260 people were rescued from modern slavery andreturned to their families in Orissa.

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For more information about CHTCS and how we can help your organization, please contact us.

Thanks to Intel’s Supply Chain Director, Carolyn Duran, Intel was able to release the world’s very first microprocessors built completely from conflict-free minerals in 2014. Now she has set her sights higher, hoping to declare the entire company’s product line conflict-free by 2016.

Cellphones, computers, and many of the other electronics used throughout the world would not work without the processors made by companies like Intel. The minerals required to build these electronics,gold and the 3T minerals (tin, tantalum, and tungsten), are often traced back to countries in conflict, like the Democratic Republic of Congo. Unfortunately the profits from the illicit trade in minerals are regularly used to finance ongoing conflicts and lead to the deaths of innocent people. Duran and Intel understood that this was a problem, and decided they no longer wanted to “contribute to an economy of suffering.”

To address this issue, Duran and her team visited 91 smelters in 21 countries and encouraged them to adopt best practices that would help reduce the trading of conflict minerals. Pressuring these smelters to “develop and implement an auditing system to track minerals so corporate buyers can source responsibly” resulted in almost half of the world’s 3T smelters passing conflict-free audits. While Duran is proud of the progress she and Intel have made, she expressed that “this is not a problem that Intel or any one company can solve. We’re proud to be a leader in this area, but we’re not in it to be the leader; we’re in it to get more people engaged.”

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For more information about CHTCS and how we can help your organization, please contact us.

For more information about CHTCS and how we can help your organization, please contact us.

In the past week, over 1,000 migrants have died in the Mediterranean Sea while being smuggled from Libya to southern Europe. The most recent event, which occurred early Sunday morning, resulted in the deaths of more than 800 men, women, and children after an over capacity fishing vessel capsized with half of the passengers locked in the below deck cabin. These terrible events led to an emergency EU meeting in Luxembourg on Monday, where interior and foreign ministers decided on increasing maritime patrols, broadening search-and-rescue guidelines, and launching “civil-military” action against the networks of human traffickers in Libya. While the details of these operations have not been specified, one objective of the civil-military operations is to capture and destroy the ships being used by the traffickers.

Although the military operations appear to be a sound way to address the root cause of migrant trafficking stemming from Libya, many EU officials remain unconvinced that the EU will be able to take meaningful action. Latvian Interior Minister Richards Kozlovskis asked “How can it be done? It’s not so easy this civil-military operation. We’re talking of the territorial waters of third countries” while another senior EU official said “The idea of surgical strikes on traffickers is not very serious. Do they know enough about the traffickers to mount a military operation?” As the EU is placing emphasis on dissolving the human trafficking organizations responsible for sending hundreds of migrants to their deaths, the general public’s main complaint has been that the EU’s lackluster search-and-rescue response contributed to the steep death toll. It will be interesting to see how the European Union responds in the coming weeks as “there are thousands of migrants from sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East waiting in the chaos of Libya to board unseaworthy vessels bound for Europe.”

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This week the California Department of Justice distributed letters to California manufacturers and retailers reminding them of the Transparency in Supply Chains Act which requires those it affects to disclose their efforts to remove human trafficking and modern slavery from their supply chains. Specifically the Transparency in Supply Chains Act applies to businesses operating in California with gross sales of $100 million or more. The letters accompany the California Transparency in Supply Chains Act Resource Guide issued this week by California Attorney General, Kamala Harris, which helps those same retailers and manufacturers determine whether the act applies to them or not. “The California letters generally request a report, within 30 days of the letter date, as to whether the receiving companies are complying with the Act, or, if they believe they are exempt, an explanation as to why.”

Those companies that do have to comply with the Act are expected to disclose on their websites their efforts to, for example, verify that their supply chains evaluate risks of human trafficking and slavery, and audit suppliers to determine their compliance with company standards for human trafficking and slavery. While these areonly two of the things these companies are required to disclose, the reality is that the compliance process is much more complex and thorough, which it should be. “The California law is likely a harbinger of things to come. Similar legislation has been proposed in New York, and other states are sure to follow.”

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