The White House
Remarks
ADMINISTRATOR SAMANTHA POWER: Thank you so much, Ambassador. Thanks to Secretary [Antony] Blinken, and all of you who are doing so much to combat this horrific crime.
I have attended many of these task force meetings. In my current capacity, this is my third – as it is for many of you, I believe – four as UN Ambassador, and several as the staffer as President Obama's human rights adviser. And I can't think of a previous meeting where there was such personal testimony. This builds on Katherine's [Tai] point, it's very inspiring to see just how personally people are taking this cause and the conviction and the commitment as manifested in the work of you and your teams. So I also am just very honored to be here.
Since 2001, well before my time, USAID has invested nearly $400 million across 88 countries to fight human trafficking. And we try to bring a toolkit in partnership with the communities in which we work – the tools range from conducting research that sheds light on key drivers and flows of trafficking, to helping deliver legal assistance to survivors, people still in captivity or enslavement, to bringing together local, national, and regional stakeholders to coordinate new policy, new legislation, new regulation, and new enforcement.
In all of this and other work, we, like so many have mentioned here at other agencies, are committed to survivor-focused efforts. USAID’s comparative advantage is our ground game and our ability to connect the ability to support individuals at the local level, while working to take what we learn from that support to enable systemic progress at the national and regional level.
Stories of real people – today at this meeting – I think, have brought home the human stakes of the effort and I will share as well a story of Salam, who is a 26-year-old from Bangladesh. A few years ago, Salam heard about a new IT job in Cambodia that would pay five times more than his current job. His dad mortgaged the family farm to help Salam pay for his travel and visa, but once in Cambodia, Salam was forced into a labor compound and made to work for hours for a criminal scamming network. His documents, like so many, were confiscated and his communication with his family was cut off.
Thankfully, a USAID-supported program helped Salam make his way out of the compound in September of 2022. But, and this happened so often once he returned to his community, he had little support in getting the counseling and the resources he needed to reintegrate, much less the legal support that he needed to try his case.
Bangladesh is, of course, one of the countries hit hardest by human trafficking – it falls within the top ten countries worldwide for the number of people in the country trapped in modern slavery. And the enormity of the problem in a country like Bangladesh makes it difficult for the government to provide survivors with those kinds of resources to reintegrate them. And in many cases, of course, the justice system is completely overwhelmed by the sheer number of perpetrators or the sophistication of those networks. So we're hugely appreciative of the collaborative work by other agencies in the intelligence, the justice, the labor, the trade, and of course, the diplomatic spheres.
USAID worked with the Government of Bangladesh to help craft, in the first instance and then revise, its national plan of action to combat human trafficking, and to empower communities with the tools to enforce it. We worked with survivors like Salam, and leaders in civil society and government, to establish guidelines that outline a step by step process for service providers to offer counseling places of safety for victims as they reintegrate, and legal support to try to bring perpetrators to justice.
Today, Salam is working as what is called a survivor empowerment officer at one of our partner organizations, helping alert people who are still enslaved to their rights, while also helping integrate those who mercifully have made their way out of captivity.
To keep cases from lingering in the justice system, USAID is working directly with the Government of Bangladesh – and again this is just one example – but to bring home just the range of inputs and support that are needed, but to build its capacity to actually try cases. We train nearly 500 members of the judiciary, law enforcement, trafficking tribunals, lawyers, and court administrators in handling trafficking cases so they can do so more quickly and effectively and put survivors at the center of their focus.
Even in just the past year, these efforts are already making a difference. In 2023, courts in Bangladesh successfully tried three times as many cases as the year before – and achieved five times the number of convictions. But before we celebrate too much, the numbers are very, very small. I will not share those numbers, because we want to inspire more work, but the baseline unfortunately was very, very low. We are continuing to build on these efforts, sharing information to help more governments and leaders understand the evolving threat, and of course, to appreciate best practices for combating it, as well as to remember, always, to empower local leaders and survivors who we know are best at driving the change we seek.
Thank you so much.