The court system in the Kingdom has failed to clearly criminalize human trafficking from an Islamic perspective in the international human rights groups, said Nasser Al-Shahrani, head of the administrative committee at the Commission for Investigation and Prosecution Sunday. Al-Shahrani's comment came during the activities of the second day of the third scholarly symposium on human trafficking organized by the Ministry of Justice and the Naif Arab University for Security Sciences (NAUSS) at the university campus here. An anti-human trafficking law has been submitted to the King for final approval, he said. The law, guided by the Islamic Shariah, comes in line with international laws combating human trafficking as to prevent it, criminalize it from an Islamic perspective, and to protect its victims. As the gap between rich and poor grows wider, destitute families are increasingly selling their most valuable property: their children. Trafficked children are usually denied education, communication with their parents; and most importantly, they are denied a normal child's life, he said. According to media reports, in some destitute parts of Asia, a child is sold for as low as SR2,000. “Their mothers or the middlemen bring them to me,” a woman agent of human trafficking was reportedly quoted as saying. “There are always fresh ones,” she said. There seems to be no shortage of kids for sale in a continent where 790 million people earn less than $1 a day. Trigged by poverty, human trafficking is a business-driven organized crime that takes different forms including forced labor and prostitution, Shahrani said. International organizations fighting human trafficking defined modern time slavery as people being sold or tricked by agents into servitude to do something against their will, without having a way out, or the right to object, he said. According to the UN definitions, domestic help can fall into the category of modern day slavery when domestic workers are humiliated, mistreated, deprived of privacy and days off. Modern slavery has become a booming international trade that involves at least 2.5 million people being trafficked in bondage through physical or psychological force at any one time, representing the tip of an iceberg. The UN international Labor Organization calculates the minimum number of people in forced labor at 12.3 million in a market valued at $32 billion, while research by Free the Slaves, a nongovernmental organization (NGO) based in the United States, puts the number at 27 million people.
