A United States State Department report on human trafficking said that official complicity in human trafficking in Sri Lanka remained “a serious problem”, as it placed Sri Lanka on the Tier 2 Watch List for the fourth consecutive year in its annual report on trafficking.
“The Government of Sri Lanka does not fully meet the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking,” said the report, noting that “it is making significant efforts to do so.”
The State Department report said that Sri Lanka was granted a waiver that would have allowed it to downgrade a tier as the government had “devoted sufficient resources to a written plan that, if implemented, would constitute significant efforts to meet the minimum standards”.
Yet implementation of that plan was missing, according to the report.
“Despite these measures, the government did not demonstrate overall increasing anti-trafficking efforts compared to the previous reporting period,” it stated.
The report went on to state that on the island “women and children are subjected to sex trafficking in brothels”. “Boys are more likely than girls to be forced into prostitution in coastal areas for child sex tourism,” it added.
“The government did not report any investigations, prosecutions, or convictions of government officials complicit in human trafficking offences,” the State Department noted.
See the full text of the report here.
