Debt bondage in agriculture and construction and women being forced into the sex trade are common in Greece, report says.
An annual State Department report on human trafficking – published on World Refugee Day – highlights Greece as a transit country for women obliged to work in the sex trade and migrants subjected to forced labour on farms and construction sites.
Bangladeshi worker Mohamed (C), 25, is helped by colleagues into a tent in the town of Manolada following the shooting incident
The US State Department has maintained Greece’s position as a Tier 2 country in its latests human trafficking report, highlighting it as a transit destination for women and children subjected to sex trafficking and forced labour.
“Women from Albania, Belarus, Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Russia, Romania, Ukraine, Georgia, Nigeria, and some countries in Asia are subjected to sex trafficking in Greece,” the report says.
It adds: “Victims are subjected to debt bondage in agriculture and construction. Hundreds of children, mainly Roma from Albania and Romania, are subjected to forced labour in Greece and made to sell goods on the street, beg, or commit petty theft.”
The Tier 2 level country is one where a government is not fully compliant with the minimum protection of victims and in which the number of victims of severe abuse is significantly increasing.
The annual State Department’s report – published on June 20 to mark World Refugee Day – describes how children from Romania are brought to Greece and forced to work, and how Roma from Bulgaria are increasingly lured on the promise of employment and subjected to forced begging, with children being subjected to forced petty theft…
(Read the full report on Eleftherotypia’s English website: http://www.enetenglish.gr/?i=news.en.society&id=1202
State Department’s original report can be accessed here: http://www.state.gov/j/tip/rls/tiprpt/2012/192367.htm)
I can't relax in Greece 
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