Trafficking in Persons in Indonesia: A Review on Current Anti-Trafficking Legislation Development
Trafficking in persons has become a global phenomena, including within Indonesia. Even now, Indonesia is identified as a source, transit, and destination country for victims of trafficking in persons for the purposes of forced labor and commercial sexual exploitation. The victims include women, children, and men. However, Indonesia is committed to preventing trafficking in persons, punishing offenders, and protecting victims of trafficking. Towards this end, Indonesia is taking many strategic and practical steps to eradicate trafficking in persons; including enacting current specific anti-trafficking law to cope with this type of crime; i.e., Law No. 21 of 2007 on the Eradication of Criminal Act of Trafficking in Persons. This article examines the development of anti trafficking legislation in Indonesia, including international instruments, prior legislation, and current legislation adopted in coping with the criminal act of trafficking in persons. The results would provide more undertsnading pertaining to trafficking in persons in Indonesia and the development of acts adopted by the country in adressing this criminal act. Keywords: Indonesia, trafficking in persons, legislation development
Experiences of exploitation and human trafficking among a sample of Indonesian migrant domestic workers
Significant growth in the economies of some Asian countries has led to a strong demand for low-skilled labour, which is largely being filled by migrant workers from Southeast Asian countries. Live-in migrant domestic workers are in particularly high demand, as the recruitment of migrants enables women in less developed countries to seek employment in skilled positions, instead of performing care-related and household tasks full-time (Lan 2003; Salazar Parrenas 2000). Yet, migrants are particularly vulnerable to labour exploitation and human exploitation and human rights abuses, which in some cases involve human trafficking (Anti-Slavery Internal 2006; Human Rights Watch 2010, 2006, 2004; ILO 2006a, 2006b; IOM 2010; OSCE 2010). Labour exploitation can involve abusive working conditions where an employee is forced to work and is not free to cease proving services, as well as wage manipulation, excessive working days or hours, low or no salary and a general disregard for labour laws ( such as the absence or substitution of an employee contract; ILO 2009). Labour exploitation can result from human trafficking where a person has been recruited, transferred or received, by means of threat, coercion or deception, for the purpose of exploitation. The vulnerability of migrants to these human rights abuses can be partly attributed to high levels of undocumented labour migration and unscrupulous practices by labour agents, as well as an apparent 'normalisation' or 'invisibilisation' of exploitation and abuse among employers of domestic workers in some countries (GATW 2011:57).
The Internet and the Changing Beijing-Taipei Relations: Toward Unification or Fragmentation?
Information and its technologies facilitate the exercise of what has been called “soft power,” a concept that differentiates information from the conventional dimensions of “hard power,” which is mainly associated with military force and economic influence. Soft power, according to Nye, a former Assistant Secretary of Defense of the United States, means that “A country may obtain the outcomes it wants in world politics because other countries want to follow it, admiring its values, emulating its example, aspiring to its level of prosperity and openness. In this sense it is just as important to set the agenda in world politics and attract others as it is to force them to change through the threat or use of military or economic weapons.”1