Qatar: Arab schools urged to teach ills of human trafficking

Qatar proposed on Wednesday that Arab countries introduce material on the fight against human trafficking into their school curriculums in order to raise awareness of the scourge.

"The issue of human trafficking must figure in modern curriculums in order to raise awareness and ensure a secure future for our societies," the secretary general of Qatar's Higher Family Council, Abdullah bin Nasser al-Khalifa, told the opening session of a conference on human trafficking.

Mariam al-Maliki, who coordinates the drive to combat human trafficking in the gas-rich Gulf state, said the campaign had been made more pressing by "the big economic and social changes experienced by Gulf societies," in particular population growth and the growing need for expatriate labour.

The two-day conference is organised by Qatar and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, with the participation of representatives of the United Nations Children's Fund.

The United States and international human rights groups have highlighted the problem of human trafficking in the oil-rich Gulf states, home to more than 13 million expatriates, many of them unskilled and low-paid Asian workers vulnerable to abuse.

The US State Department human trafficking report in 2006 upgraded the United Arab Emirates from the "Tier 3" of worst offenders to "Tier 2 Watch List" comprising countries which are making "significant" efforts to deal with the problem.

The UAE maintained its rank in the 2007 edition of the report, but other Gulf countries -- Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman and Qatar -- were downgraded to Tier 3, joining Saudi Arabia.

According to UN estimates, around 2.5 million people -- 80 percent of them women and children -- are being trafficked around the world at any given time for purposes such as forced labour, sexual exploitation, the removal of organs and body parts, forced marriages, child adoption and begging.

Global annual profits from the exploitation of trafficked forced labour are estimated at 31.6 billion dollars.

-- Agence France-Presse