(MintPress) – Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich suggested hypocrisy by the United States when the U.S. put Russia on its watch list for human trafficking, its ninth consecutive year on the list. The listing of Russia as a Tier 2 Watch List country for trafficking comes during a time when relations between the two powers have been increasingly strained by continuous claims by the U.S. that Russia has demonstrated violations of human rights since President Vladimir Putin took power in 2000.
The annual report, released by the U.S. State Department, ranks countries by a four-tier system, with Russia ranked in the second-lowest category, putting it on par with China and Afghanistan. Countries under Russia include Sudan, Syria, North Korea and Cuba. Lukashevich said the rankings are politically motivated and that the U.S. paints itself as “straight-A students” when the country has its own human trafficking problems.
“The United States has been and remains the world’s largest human trafficking ‘importer,’” Lukashevich wrote.
Russia has said its spot on the list is unwarranted because it has made efforts to reduce trafficking by coordinating with the United Nations to create the Group of Friends United against Human Trafficking, consisting of Russia and 19 other countries, such as Belarus, which initiated the group, along with Libya and the Philippines.
Despite the initiative, the U.S. was still critical of Russia in its report, saying that Russia does not comply with the minimum standards for eliminating trafficking. The U.S. said Russia’s involvement with the group was the sole reason it was not downgraded to a Tier 3 country.
“Russia is a source, transit, and destination country for men, women, and children who are subjected to forced labor and sex trafficking,” the report read. “The Migration Research Center estimates that one million people in Russia are exposed to ‘exploitative’ labor conditions that are characteristic of trafficking cases, such as withholding of documents, nonpayment for services, physical abuse, or extremely poor living conditions.”
David Batstone, president of Not for Sale, a non-profit organization dedicated to battling human trafficking and slavery, said Russia turned the report into a political calamity rather than accepting responsibility for its actions and instances of human trafficking.
“Russia is choosing to publicly politicize their critique of the [State Department] report rather than recognize their responsibility as a government to address the real problems that are going on, and their inaction to address them,” Batstone told the Los Angeles Times.
The State Department’s report did not quantify instances of trafficking in Russia, but it estimated that 1 million people in Russia could qualify as victims of human trafficking. The report also suggested that forced labor was the most common instance of trafficking in the country. A 2009 report by the International Labor Organization cited similar findings in Russia.
The U.S. labeled itself as a Tier 1 country in the report, despite high concentrations of sex trafficking and forced labor in many of America’s largest cities. The State Department report dubbed the U.S. a “destination country for men, women, and children – both U.S. citizens and foreign nationals – subjected to forced labor, debt bondage, involuntary servitude, and sex trafficking.”
But cities in the U.S., such as Houston, Texas, act as major hubs of sex trafficking in the United States. Free Our City, a group dedicated to abolishing sex trafficking in Texas, noted that there are more than 200 brothels actively operating in Houston and that the city is home to more illicit spas than Las Vegas.
A study done by the Dallas Women’s Foundation showed that 740 girls under the age of 18 were documented as being trafficked for sex in a 30-day period in Texas. The numbers show that there are more girls in the trafficking trade in one month in Texas than there are teen girls who die by suicide, homicide or accidents in the state in one year.
The National Human Rights Center estimates that there are 10,000 forced laborers in the U.S., many of which are hired as private servants. The group says low wages, lack of regulation and monitoring of working conditions and a high demand for cheap labor keep the illegal trafficking prevalent.