Human trafficking
The Haitian government says it has dismissed four employees at the office of the Commissioner at the Court of First Instance of Port-au-Prince following an investigation into a human trafficking network earlier this year.
Serious administrative errors
Justice Minister Heidi Fortuné said the four employees had been dismissed for “serious administrative errors in the processing of the Kaliko Beach hotel file, relating to the trafficking of persons and criminal associations”.
The government said that the workers were also sent home for their involvement in the release of nine alleged traffickers of persons arrested in February 2017 in a room of the hotel.
The Port-au-Prince Public Prosecutor’s Office had launched the probe in February after reports surfaced then that several girls were going to be sold by a network of human traffickers.
Joint operation
A joint operation involving members of the Central Directorate of the Judicial Police (DCPJ), the National Police of Haiti (PNH) and assisted by United Nations police officers (UNPol), among other law enforcement officials went to the hotel on the Arcadin Coast, about 60 kilometres from the capital where they rescued 33 young girls, including 20 minors, some as young as 13 years old.
The authorities said then that the women were to be sold for a few hundred dollars. Police arrested 12 suspected traffickers.
The arrest came as the government said then that Haiti is still on the blacklist of the US State Department of Trafficking countries, alongside Suriname, Burma, Djibouti, Papua New Guinea, Sudan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.
The Justice Minister said that the Kaliko Beach hotel had been exonerated “in this unfortunate affair”.
