The deportation statistics from Federal Investigation Agency suggest that the total number of deportees coming back to Pakistan is increasing since 2007, with a growth of 16 percent from 2007 to 2013. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) revealed on Thursday in one of its reports, "The Socio-Economic Impact of Human Trafficking and Migrant Smuggling in Pakistan," that the number of deportees was the highest in 2013 with 66,427 individual cases.
"Analysing deportation patterns can be one of the only feasible means of estimating the volume of trafficking in persons and smuggling of migrants in Pakistan because of the complexity of the phenomenon," the report said. The report says that Pakistan has been observed to be a major source, transit and destination for trafficking in persons and smuggling of migrants, which suggests that the activity and the associated illegal economy involved is substantial.
The UNODC research finds that bulk of the illegal migration is from Punjab, particularly from Gujrat, Gujranwala, Mandi Bahauddin, Dera Ghazi Khan, Multan and Sialkot. The largest number of deportees arriving back by the sea route come from Oman and those coming back by air are largely returning from Spain and Turkey, it said. The UNODC global report predicts that 45 percent of the victims of trafficking are regional, 27 percent are domestically-trafficked, 24 percent are transcontinental and only 4 percent are regional.
"It has also been observed that domestic trafficking cases rose from 19 percent in 2007 to 31 percent in 2010," it said. The report says that poverty, lack of access to education, widespread unemployment and rural-urban migration could be the reasons behind prevalence of the domestic trafficking.
According to the US Department of State's Trafficking in Persons report 2013, Pakistan was classified as a Tier-II country. These countries are defined by the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons as "countries whose governments don't fully comply with the TVPA's minimum standards, are making significant efforts to bring themselves into compliance with those standards."
In 2014, the US Department of State Trafficking in Persons report reclassified Pakistan as a Tier-II watch list country, suggesting "there is a failure to provide evidence of increasing efforts to combat severe forms of trafficking in persons from the previous year."
The report says that trafficking in persons and smuggling of migrants is an enormous business as the ILO estimates that the private sector generates 150 billion US dollars world-wide through the use of forced labour and 51.8 billion of this is in the Asia Pacific region alone.
Speaking on the occasion, Qudratullah, Additional Director General Immigration, said that Federal Investigation Agency was making all-out efforts to curb the human trafficking as this was bringing a bad name to the country. He said that the FIA arrested 624 human smuggler including 29 most wanted in 2014 to check the crime. "We are also trying to introduce technology and some innovation at our airports and border entry-exit points to check the human trafficking," he said.
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