Cablegate: Pretoria Inputs to the 2010 Trafficking in Persons

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UNCLAS SECTION 01 OF 08 PRETORIA 000289

SIPDIS
SENSITIVE

DEPT FOR AF/S, AF/RSA; G/TIP FOR STEPHANIE KRONENBURG;
G-LAURA PENA, INL, DRL, PRM

E.O. 12958: N/A
TAGS: PGOV PREL SF KTIP KCRM PHUM KWMN SMIG KFRD
ASEC, PREF, ELAB, KMCA
SUBJECT: PRETORIA INPUTS TO THE 2010 TRAFFICKING IN PERSONS
(TIP) REPORT -- PART 1 OF 3

REF: A. STATE 02094
B. PRETORIA 1551
C. PRETORIA 2016
D. PRETORIA 2229
E. PRETORIA 2567
F. PRETORIA 2671

-------
Summary
-------

1. Post hereby submits responses to the Department's action
request (ref A) for the tenth annual Trafficking in Persons
(TIP) Report, covering the period from mid-February 2009
through mid-February 2010. Following an overview of South
Africa's counter-trafficking efforts, and of its unique
capacity challenges as a 15-year-old emerging democracy,
responses in paragraphs 7-15 correspond to reftel's
paragraphs 25-35 of specific questions. Paragraphs 16-19
below then list sources, Post contributors, time spent, and
TIP contact at post. End Summary.

--------------------------------------------- ---------
Overview: Major Milestones Ahead -- TIP Law, World Cup
--------------------------------------------- ---------

2. Per Post's reporting through the year (Refs B-F), the
South African government (SAG) is committed to combating the
scourge of human trafficking. Political will does exist at
the national level, and the typically glacial pace of
government progress has been helpfully prodded by advocacy
from civil society groups and international media attention.
The 2009-10 reporting period was dominated by preparations
for two significant hurdles -- enactment of a comprehensive
Trafficking Law, and hosting of the FIFA World Cup -- due to
be passed in 2010.

3. On the legislative front, the SAG's counter-trafficking
Bill has been in a protracted gestation phase, which is at
last due to yield a formal TIP Law in 2010. The legislation
and its associated interagency procedures have been in the
works for some years now, including via repeated rounds of
public consultation. (Note: South Africa's slow lawmaking
process is aggravating to outside observers, but the TIP
Bill's long development is common, even for high priority
"fast track" initiatives. End Note.) By year-end 2009, the
SAG's executive branch had completed its draft, for the
Minister of Justice to submit to Parliament at its opening
session in February 2010. With three parliamentary
committees acting as midwives, the question is not whether
the law will be born, but only how long and arduous will be
the labor. Among our sources, predictions for the law's
passage range from March to November, either of which may be
correct. The law will establish mandates, provide budgets,
and initiate coordination of public and private action to
combat TIP. (Many TIP discussions are predicated on it:
"Once the law is passed, we will be able to....")

4. The 2010 World Cup in South Africa continues to be an
important catalyst for TIP awareness and prevention activity.
The SAG has drafted a Child Protection Strategy at national
level, and it tasked each province hosting a World Cup game
to write a plan for child protection and TIP prevention.
Qto write a plan for child protection and TIP prevention.
These plans were successfully tested during the 2009
Confederations Cup (precursor to World Cup), when post was
not aware of any cases of TIP linked to the games. The more
nimble civil society sector has been energetic in its concern
for children, who may be vulnerable while schools are closed
during the games. An anti-TIP consortium of of NGOs in
Western Cape province (ref C), the Nelson Mandela Children's
Fund (ref F), local and global church networks, and countless
other local organizations are mobilized around child
protection. These independent initiatives lack a single

PRETORIA 00000289 002.2 OF 008

point of national coordination, hence they may have both gaps
and overlaps, but they illustrate how factors like the
pending TIP Bill, long-running grass-roots advocacy, and a
World Cup driven spike in media attention have created a
"buzz" around TIP in 2009. That buzz has in turn put
constructive pressure on the SAG to pass the TIP Bill, for
which the SAG does have a sense of urgency.

-------------------------------------------
Context: Great Need, But Fledgling Capacity
-------------------------------------------

5. Classed as a 'middle income' economy, South Africa is
often mistaken for a uniformly first-world, developed nation,
without a full appreciation of the magnitude of its
challenges and constraints in combating crime and social
ills. Income distribution is highly skewed, with a very
small segment of concentrated affluence amid a wider
population of which more than half live below the poverty
line. Its very status as a world-class tourism destination,
with extensive transport links serving as a regional hub,
combine with its wide income disparities to create especially
fertile ground for TIP.

6. As a 15-year-old democracy, the SAG is still in its
infancy, struggling to extend governance and protections to
the majority of its citizens who were woefully neglected
under apartheid. Legislative frameworks on rights and
justice are in the process of fundamental overhaul, yet the
shortfall in implementation capacity is estimated on the
order of several hundred thousand mid-level workers. The SAG
particularly lacks the skilled workers it needs to implement
programs, and government salaries are low. Members of
Parliament have no professionally trained staff; SAG
departments are massively overstretched; police are expanding
but still strained; and social workers are in desperately
short supply. A very dynamic civil society sector helps to
bridge some of the gaps, creating a vibrant and vocal but
often patchy advocacy community. It is in this context of
transitional democracy -- wholly committed but nascent and
still largely underdeveloped -- that South Africa's efforts
should be judged.

-------------
TIP Situation
-------------

7. (Responses to paragraph 25 of Ref A.)

-- A. Sources of information on TIP were dispersed, since
many groups addressed the issue. With a range of SAG
agencies, IOs, NGOs, faith based organizations (FBOs), and
community groups (CBOs) confronting different aspects of the
problem, there was no central repository of qualitative
information and no source of statistical data. While a wide
array of anti-TIP efforts were underway in South Africa, the
majority of those were not publicized or published, and
information had to be gathered primarily through in-person
meetings. The counterparts interviewed by post for this
year's TIP Report are listed in paragraph 16. Post believes
these sources were reliable, in the sense of being truthful,
Qthese sources were reliable, in the sense of being truthful,
but their information was likely to be incomplete, given the
underground nature of TIP and the many diverse groups
fighting it. Documentation of TIP will improve after this
year with the pending passage of TIP legislation, generating
formal requirements for parliamentary reporting and statutes
for compiling crime statistics.

-- B. South Africa was a country of origin, transit, and
destination for women, children, and men trafficked
internally (domestically) and internationally across its
borders. (The country had no ungoverned territory or civil
war.) Domestically, victims were largely trafficked from
poor rural areas to urban centers like Johannesburg, Cape

PRETORIA 00000289 003.2 OF 008

Town, Durban, and Bloemfontein. For a detailed list of
primary locations and a map of main domestic trafficking
routes, see pages 32-33 of the IOM's October 2008 report, "No
Experience Necessary: The Internal Trafficking of Persons in
South Africa" of research funded by USAID (Ref C;
http://iom.org.za under "publications"). These patterns
remained valid in 2009.

Among international victims, countries of origin can be
partly inferred from the 306 victims directly assisted by IOM
from January 2004 to January 2010. These were a mix of
persons from Asia and neighboring countries of Southern
Africa -- most of them Thai (153), as well as Congolese (36),
Zimbabwean (29), Mozambican (20), Indian (12), and Chinese
(11). According to the NPA, Chinese traffickers made
Johannesburg a regional hub for collecting victims from
Lesotho, Mozambique, and Swaziland, for exploitation locally
and in other cities. Trafficking into South Africa from
neighboring Angola, Mozambique, Congo, and Zimbabwe was
believed to be on the rise. From more distant countries,
however, it may be falling: the flow of trafficked Thai women
appeared to slow in 2009 (perhaps due to successful pressure
by law enforcement, made aware of this segment in recent
years), while the demand for Eastern European women for sex
work in exclusive private men's clubs was now being met by
willing prostitutes rather than TIP victims.

Women are trafficked out of South Africa mainly to Europe and
the Far East (albeit in relatively small numbers compared to
the internal trade), for commercial sexual exploitation at
clubs in the U.K. or Ireland, or domestic work then followed
by sexual exploitation. Nigerian syndicates, who have the
strongest grip on TIP inside South Africa, have reportedly
begun moving trafficked women to the U.S. as well, targeting
African migrant clients there.

The IOM study catalogued five main purposes of internal TIP:
commercial sexual exploitation (both male and female),
domestic servitude (girls), agricultural labor (boys), street
work (vending, begging, and crime), and a perversion of
"muthi" (which broadly means traditional medicine, but in
this context organ removal for use in such medicine). Both
internally and internationally, commercial sexual
exploitation was the primary purpose, to which the sources
and destinations described above refer. According to the
South African Department of Labor (SADOL), ethnic Chinese
(from PRC or ROC) laborers were trafficked to sweatshop
factories in Chinese urban enclaves in South Africa. These
operations were highly organized and mobile to evade labor
inspectors, even moving in and out of neighboring Lesotho and
Swaziland to avoid arrest. While SADOL acknowledged that
Mozambican or Zimbabwean men and children were exploited by
labor brokers in South Africa for farm work, SADOL
characterized this as a localized abuse of migrants already
seeking work in the area, rather than TIP per se. The South
Qseeking work in the area, rather than TIP per se. The South
African Police Service (SAPS)' TIP officer also described
exploitative farm labor in border areas as smuggling more
than TIP.

There were no available estimates of the numbers of TIP
victims in South Africa, but numbers were believed to be
high. Patterns of TIP destinations and purposes in 2009 were
consistent with those reported in prior years. New brothels
have proliferated near football stadiums in advance of the
2010 FIFA World Cup. Many of these new venues have
undertaken recruitment drives -- for willing sex workers and
probably newly groomed TIP victims as well -- and were fully
staffed during the peak year-end holiday season, ready to
cater to visiting football fans.

-- C. Victims faced conditions of confinement, intimidation,
and abuse. For example, in the domestic servitude TIP trade,
the IOM study recounts that girls in the Western Cape were
bused to big cities, then corralled into small holding rooms

PRETORIA 00000289 004.2 OF 008

of 20-30 girls, and paraded before prospective employers
until "purchased." Once brought to work in a private home,
many were subject to abuse (including sexual) by employers,
and too frightened or ashamed to escape. Those who fled
could easily fall prey to sexual traffickers. On farms,
laborers were often paid little or nothing to work long hours
and live in substandard conditions. Across all categories of
TIP, traffickers controlled victims through intimidation and
threats, use of force, confiscation of identity documents to
discourage escape, demands to pay job "debts," and even
forced use of drugs and alcohol.

-- D. South Africans most at risk of becoming trafficking
victims were mainly poor blacks, from rural areas suffering
high rates of unemployment and from where wage earners had
traditionally migrated to cities in search of work. With
half the population below the poverty line, and roughly a
third unemployed (spiking this year due to the economic
crisis), many who were desperate for work would travel long
distances to where the economy was more robust. Economic
disparities among racial groups and between rural vs. urban
communities created trafficking opportunities.

The AIDS epidemic in South Africa also increased mobility,
and hence vulnerability, not just of young men but of women
and children heads of household. NGOs such as Khulisa
estimated that children made up 60 percent of TIP victims in
South Africa, although kept on farms and in private homes
these were harder for law enforcement to locate and rescue
compared to the more easily identifiable foreign women in
brothels. A growing population of orphans were vulnerable to
predatory traffickers for exploitation in crime, labor, or
the growing demand for younger virgins in a sex trade more
fearful of HIV/AIDS. In a culture with some of the world's
highest rates of rape and gender violence, victims fleeing
forced marriages or abuse at home could fall prey to TIP.

-- E. Organized criminal groups including Nigerian, Chinese,
Thai, Ukranian, and Russian syndicates and local gangs
facilitated trafficking into, through and within South Africa
for the purpose of commercial sexual exploitation. Some of
these syndicates may even have spawned offshoot operations in
neighboring countries. International mafias initially
recruited victims of their own nationalities, but there was
also secondary "swapping" of victims. Informed sources
indicated that Nigerian groups also dominated domestic TIP
for the sex trade. The IOM study documented very organized
regional networks trading in teens and young women for
domestic servitude, particularly in the Western Cape.
Smaller, more amateur groups typically operate in other
labor-related TIP such as farm work or street begging.

Trafficking victims were mostly lured by promises of
lucrative (and legal) jobs enabling them to better their own
lives and send money home to their families. Whereas typical
Qlives and send money home to their families. Whereas typical
victims used to be runaways who fell prey to city pimps,
nowadays syndicates proactively sent recruiters to rural
towns. Recruiters for the sex trade were just as likely to
be women as men, and often trusted family members,
acquaintances, or neighbors. Posing as employment agencies,
traffickers for domestic labor used job ads in local
newspapers to lure victims.

--------------------
SAG Anti-TIP Efforts
--------------------

8. (Responses to paragraph 26 of Ref A.)

-- A. The SAG acknowledged the TIP problem and had drafted
comprehensive legislation to combat it. In the meantime, it
was using existing and interim legislation to arrest and
punish perpetrators, commissioning training of officials to
recognize and address TIP situations, and expanding shelters

PRETORIA 00000289 005.2 OF 008

and services to attend to victims.

-- B. NPA/SOCA had the lead in coordinating SAG
countertrafficking efforts, both within government and with
external partners from civil society. NPA/SOCA chaired a
Trafficking in Persons Inter-sectoral Task Team whose members
included the Departments of Justice and Constitutional
Development (DoJ), Home Affairs (DHA), Labor (SADOL), Social
Development (DSD), as well as the Organized Crime Unit and
Ports of Entry Division of the South African Police Service
(SAPS), the IOM, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime
(UNODC), and local NGO Molo Songololo. As only a two-person
team, however, the NPA/SOCA's capacity for outreach and
coordination was limited. Sources described South Africa's
anti-TIP activity as mainly independent, operating-level
'silos' of action among many public and private actors.
(Note: TIP responsibility may be elevated to a higher level
within the SAG upon passage of the law, raising its profile
and access to resources while likely improving coordination.
This point is for G/TIP information only, not for
publication. End Note.)

As in 2008, the Task Team's primary focus in 2009 was laying
groundwork to implement the pending law -- promoting
interagency dialogue and joint planning; formulating
standards, protocols, and interagency operating procedures
for the TIP law's implementation; and undertaking extensive
trainings of TIP concepts, identification, and agency roles.
NPA/SOCA also supervised contracts for a set of five
EU-funded anti-TIP initiatives due to run through the end of
2010. These were: curriculum development (continuing work by
IOM -- in draft, targeted for completion in August 2010);
research into TIP trends and support to victims (to be
managed by the Human Sciences Research Council, and parceled
to experts in criminology, psycho-sociology, and law);
awareness raising (given to the International Labor
Organization's International Training Center -- which will
compare "before" and "after" measures of TIP awareness, in
conjunction with school training sessions in pilot sites
across five provinces); "coordination and cooperation" with
other countries by the NPA; and monitoring and evaluation
('M&E').

-- C. The key hurdle to the SAG's anti-TIP efforts remained
comprehensive anti-TIP legislation. At year-end 2009 the
SAG's TIP Bill was fully drafted, reviewed by the Cabinet
(FOUO please), and awaiting handover by the executive
(Minister of Justice) to the legislative branch (Parliament).
The SALRC's first draft of the Bill had been released in
mid-2008, for public and interagency consultations and
suggested edits. Its revised version was submitted to the
Minister in November 2008. Parliament was disrupted by
national elections in April 2009, delaying a possible
submission to lawmakers. In July 2009, the Deputy Justice
Minister told visiting G/TIP Ambassador CdeBaca that the
government had extended a second round of public commentary
Qgovernment had extended a second round of public commentary
to the end of that month, in light of wide and strong
interest in the TIP issue and an encouragingly high volune of
public inputs. The DepMin assured CdeBaca that it was the
SAG's intent to have the bill in place by 2010, although that
goal was made more difficult by the abridged parliamentary
calendar in 2009. Sources in the Department of Justice (FOUO
please) told poloff in December that the Minister had shared
the draft with the Cabinet, as a final step toward submission
to Parliament.

(Note: although the Department guidance (ref A) excludes
forward-looking reporting, the Bill passage is likely to come
to a head around the time the Department's TIP Report goes to
press. By all accounts, the Bill will be presented to
Parliament in February 2010, but opinions vary on how long
the Parliament could take to pass it. Parliament officially
opens in mid-February, but its first week or two are given
solely to budgetary matters. The Bill could then be

PRETORIA 00000289 006.2 OF 008

submitted by the Justice Minister to his affiliated Justice
Committee by the end of February. According to UNODC officer
Johan Kruger, three separate parliamentary committees --
those of Justice, Safety and Security, and Social Development
-- must debate the Bill. Kruger will brief MPs from these
committees on TIP and the Bill, to secure their support and
speed their deliberations. Emboffs will coordinate with
Kruger and parliamentary contacts to attend briefings and
otherwise lobby key committtee members. According to Kruger,
the parliamentary committees may opt to invite further public
comment, introducing potentially long delays and even
rewrites to the Bill -- hence this variable will be the key
determinant of the Bill's progress. Once the committees
approve the Bill, it is expected to be passed readily by the
main chambers. DoJ sources forecast passage by March/April;
Kruger himself thought June/July more likely; and IOM was
most pessimistic, anticipating a vote in the Parliament's
year-end session circa October/November. End Note.)

Costing of the Bill was a concern that could become a
constraint at implementation. The NPA and SALRC both gave
assurances that the Bill's costs had been fully forecast.
SALRC said lessons had been learned from the Children's Act
(which had been inadequately costed, with the result that it
was stalled in implementation), and the TIP Bill would not
suffer the same fate. ILO and IOM were both skeptical,
however. ILO worried whether the SAG would have the capacity
and funding to sustain the awareness work it had launched,
and from which ILO would withdraw in February 2010, when
there was no sign of budgets being allocated in the absence
of a final TIP law. IOM said it had only been contacted by
costing consultants late in 2009, when the Bill was already
drafted, and they saw the effort as rushed and cursory.

Other important limitations included capacity of SAPS, NPA,
and Social Development to pursue all cases and attend to all
victims, given insufficient police and prosecutors, and
chronic shortfalls among the ranks of social workers. At
SAPS and NPA the problem was less one of funding, and more
one of these services struggling to build sufficient staff
with adequate skills for their dramatically expanded
responsibilities in the post-1994 aftermath of apartheid. At
DSD, budgets had been cut in 2009, and social workers'
salaries equivalent to US$ 400 per month could not compete
with the private sector.

Awareness of TIP-related law, ability to apply it in
identifying cases, and confident knowledge in appropriate
measures to take were also still lacking, hampering the
responses of police and immigration officers, since only a
minority had yet been exposed to counter-TIP training. Some
police officers were said to receive bribes from crime
syndicates, or failed to pursue criminals out of fear of
reprisals, or preferred to deport victims as a shortcut
Qreprisals, or preferred to deport victims as a shortcut
compared to opening a TIP investigation, particularly given
language barriers. There was no evidence of large-scale
corruption or official collaboration with traffickers, but
the large sums of money generated by the trade was believed
to fund localized corruption.

-- D. The SAG did not yet have a systematic mechanism for
monitoring and reporting the anti-trafficking efforts of its
own agencies and external partners. There were plans to
incorporate TIP tracking into a data base of justice and
crime prevention called "e-justice." The latter would track
investigations, prosecutions, and victims, across SAPS, NPA,
DHA, SADOL, and DSD. In 2008, e-justice was expected to be
two to three years in development. As of early 2010,
NPA/SOCA contacts believed development was continuing, but
they had not yet seen outputs.

-- E. The question of identity documents was a very timely
one in South Africa in 2009. The Department of Home Affairs
(DHA) had responsibility for documenting nationals (including

PRETORIA 00000289 007.2 OF 008

birth / marriage / death certificates, identity cards, and
passports) as well as for processing visas and permits for
foreign migrants and asylum seekers. DHA has long been
notoriously dysfunctional, plagued by both inefficiency and
corruption. The problem of genuine South African passports
fraudulently obtained by non-nationals has been so widespread
that in 2009 the U.K. imposed a visa (with interview)
requirement on South African travelers.

The new Home Affairs Minister appointed in 2009 candidly
acknowledged the problem, and she undertook to root out
corruption in her department and ensure document security.
(In December 2009, for example, DHA border officials
confiscated hundreds of SAG passports from travelers
suspected of being non-nationals.) A key contributing factor
to unreliability of SAG passports was late registration of
births, common among black South Africans (including the
Minister herself) who were neglected by the state under
apartheid. Because it was common for nationals to obtain
identity documents as adults, this loophole was used by
aliens to bribe officials and buy nationality. As part of
her overhaul, the Minister launched a mass campaign to
register all South Africans (complete with biometric data)
and to end late registration of births within the next two
years.

-- F. The SAG was not able to gather or analyze data on law
enforcement efforts related to human trafficking in any
systematic fashion. As noted in item "D" above, electronic
data bases were still under development to track TIP and
other cases. Moreover, until the TIP Bill was enacted as
law, statutory codes did not exist to differentiate cases of
trafficking (which would be lumped together into statistics
for all other rape, racketeering, forced labor, etc.). Even
the NPA/SOCA officers tasked with leading the SAG on TIP
nationally were unable to furnish a list of ongoing cases;
post relied on media reports. Pending the law and national
data base, the only way to collect such data would be via
manual compilation, i.e. through phone inquiries to each
prosecuting unit around the country.

-----------------------------
Investigation and Prosecution
-----------------------------

9. (Responses to paragraph 27 of Ref A.)

-- A. South Africa's Prevention and Combating of Trafficking
in Persons Bill was drafted and awaiting a vote date by
Parliament. (Cf. paragraph 8C.) The Bill was comprehensive
and specifically targeted to TIP, for both sexual
exploitation and labor, in both domestic and cross-border
cases. (Note: full text of the bill, aka "Project 131," is
at http://salawreform.justice.gov.za/reports.htm , the PDF
report next to Project 131 -- Annexure D, pages 188-269.)

Pending the TIP Bill's passage, prosecutors continued to rely
on elements of common law (e.g. rape, assault, kidnapping,
and extortion) and acts against racketeering, sexual abuse,
forced labor and child labor, and pornography. This body of
Qforced labor and child labor, and pornography. This body of
legislation included the Prevention of Organized Crime Act
121 of 1998 (POCA); the Sexual Offenses Act 23 of 1957, as
amended in December 2007; the Basic Conditions of Employment
Act 75 of 1997; the Children's Act 38 of 2005, as amended in
November 2007; the Immigration Act 13 of 2002; the Films and
Publications Act 65 of 1996; the Corruption Act 94 of 1992;
the Extradition Act 67 of 1962; and the International
Cooperation in Criminal Matters Act 75 of 1996. (Note: these
are unchanged since previous years' reports, hence they are
not reproduced here. End Note.)

Given the strong ties of TIP to criminal networks, the
Prevention of Organized Crime Act 121 of 1998 (POCA) was the
law most used to date to punish traffickers, usually those

PRETORIA 00000289 008.2 OF 008

related to the sex trade. SAPS noted that POCA also had the
most extensive list of charges, hence highest probability
that some would "stick" and yield convictions. The new
Sexual Offences Act (SOA) now criminalized trafficking for
sexual exploitation and did not allow victims to be
prosecuted for related offenses like immigration laws or
prostitution. (Note: full text of the latter provisions is
at http://www.info.gov.za/gazette/bills/2003/b50 b-03.pdf,
pages 40-41, sections 70-71(1)-71(2).)

The Children's Act of 2005 prohibited "the recruitment, sale,
supply, transportation, transportation, harboring or receipt
of children, within or across the borders of the Republic."
The law also prohibited the commercial sexual exploitation of
children, sexual intercourse with children under 16, or
permitting a female under 16 to stay in a brothel for the
purpose of prostitution. The Children's Amendment Act of
2007, signed into law in March 2008, created an advanced
regulatory framework for prevention and prosecution of child
labor, explicitly outlaws child trafficking. Section 141 of
the Act defined and criminalized the worst forms of child
labor, including TIP, in accordance with ILO Convention 182.
This Act further included a requirement for planning at a
national and provincial level along with an effective roll
out of services. Implementation of the Children's Act was
reportedly only partial in 2009, with important elements
stalled or stillborn, since key departments like DSD were
unable to fulfill them due to capacity and/or cost
constraints.

-- B. The maximum penalty for violations of the Sexual
Offences or Children's Acts was 20 years in prison. In the
past, application of common law had obtained sentences nearly
that long, as in the case of trafficker Amien Andrews,
sentenced in 1996 and still serving 17 years for charges
including kidnapping, indecent assault, and rape.

-- C. Labor related TIP offenses were punishable under a
variety of existing laws. The Basic Conditions of Employment
Act removed cases of forced and child labor from the Labor
Court and assigned them to the Criminal Court, where
sentencing was based on precedent and case law. Post was not
aware of any case prosecuted to a close to set a precedent.

-- D. Penalties for rape and sexual assault were difficult
to estimate. The Sexual Offences Act makes mention of
penalties from three to seven years, depending on offenses
and their severity, leaving the sentence to the discretion of
the court. Penalties for these crimes against children were
markedly more severe, up to a maximum life imprisonment, with
even first time offenders receiving on the order of 15 or
more years.

-- E. After a banner year in 2008, in which at least 16
traffickers were arrested and charged, post uncovered fewer
cases in 2009. This may be due to police focus on
Confederations Cup and World Cup security, or law enforcement
seeing through the caseload of 2008, or simply lack of media
Qseeing through the caseload of 2008, or simply lack of media
coverage of specific cases.

In March, police arrested several several wealthy Durban
businessmen linked to a child prostition ring. The case was
ongoing at year's end, with reportedly more arrests pending.
In October, police rescued from a Durban brothel a
13-year-old girl they believed had been trafficked from a
neighboring province; the case was under investigation at
year end. In November, a Thai woman (married to a South
African) Giang Brooderyk was arrested for luring Thai women
on promises of massage jobs, then forcing them to work as
prostitutes. The trial was postponed to February to enable
investigation.

(Text of paragraph 9 continues in the "Part 2" cable.)
GIPS

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