US says Ireland failed to tackle human trafficking

IRELAND has been accused by American authorities of failing to properly tackle human trafficking, as new figures also show a fall in asylum applications and legal challenges to refugee decisions.

The US State Department’s Trafficking in Person’s report for 2009 stated that the Irish Government does not fully comply with minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking.

Ranking Ireland alongside Portugal and Greece as the only three EU “Tier 2” countries, the report said Ireland was “a destination and, to a lesser extent, transit country for women, men and children trafficked for the purposes of commercial sexual exploitation and forced labour”. The finding will come as an embarrassment to the Government, which has recently announced a new anti-human trafficking plan and which has introduced regulations to combat human trafficking in the past year.

Immigrant Council of Ireland chief executive Denise Charlton said human trafficking was a “huge concern here” and referred to the number of unaccompanied minors who disappear from state care. According to the 2008 annual report by the Office of the Refugee Applications Commissioner (ORAC), 98 applications were received from unaccompanied minors seeking asylum last year. It took five weeks to process those applications, according to ORAC.

Overall, there were 3,866 applications for refugee status – down 3% – and 4,581 decisions made last year, an increase of 10.3%. A total of 261 applications were received from persons in detention, including prison, a figure equating to 6.8% of all applications received.

In 2008 a total of 567 cases fell into the category of deemed withdrawn due to a lack of cooperation by the applicant, according to the report.

In the foreword to the report, Commissioner David Costello said: “I am also pleased to note that the number of legal challenges against recommendations of the office declined in 2008, by some 30%.”

The report also noted that at the end of the year there were about 1,200 cases awaiting processing in the office, but only 116 cases of those were on the books for over six months.

However, some cases still take up to 23 weeks to clear, although steps have been taken to reduce waiting times. Some 385 cases were transferred to another EU state for processing last year under the EU Dublin II Regulations, a slight increase on the previous year, while last year, some 3,402 sets of fingerprints of asylum applicants were sent to EURODAC – the European fingerprint database designed solely to identify asylum seekers – with 359 hits confirmed.

The report also stated that ORAC used €9.1m from the Department of Justice budget, with non-pay expenditure standing at €4.3m.