63 Senegalese children at the shelter and NAATIP

I went to the NAATIP office to meet the new Director, and it was a very pleasant meeting. He is the former prosecutor at the police and studied human rights law in the UK. He knows the TIP Act and read all the reports I shared with the office. He already contacted UNDP to get some funding for an independent building for NAATIP, and a vehicle so they can get around. Tulai Jawara is now the Deputy Director. In the end, myself and NAATIP were not invited to the meeting held about the children - as the Director of Social Welfare told NAATIP staff that this is not a trafficking case. Instead, the case is described as "child labour", "exploitation" and now "children in difficult circumstances" by DSW. The breakthrough is that the Director of NAATIP wants to investigate and prosecute the case as he and the Solicitor General agree this is a clear trafficking case. Hurray!

The NAATIP Director visited the Shelter himself last Wednesday and spoke to some of the children. All the children come from Njamakuta.They told him that some of them were sent by a marabout from Njamakuta village to make money for him to be able to fund a yearly festival he organises. This was not reported in the media and DSW did not know about this. They did confirm that all the children at the Shelter know the Quran very well and all went to the same Daraa in their village. The NAATIP Director said that "the Director of SW should stop elbowing us out". I will leave it up to the two of them to discuss mandates and responsibilities.

You will read in my semi annual report that we have started recording cases of (potential) trafficking at PROTECT, and out of the 13 cases we came across, 9 could be classified as such. None of those were reported to NAATIP and therefore go unreported/uninvestigated/unprosecuted. Hopefully this will now change.

Yesterday morning I attended a meeting organized by the Director of SW about the repatriation of these 63 children as the government does not have any funds to support them at the Shelter for Children in Bakoteh any longer. UNICEF, CEDAG (Child and Environmental Development Association, the lead organization of the West African Network supporting children on the move) plus the police and immigration were invited to discuss repatriation.
 
We were told that 15 children escaped from the Shelter, and some of them were thought to be over 18. They have been violent and 'wild' according to DSW as they do not want to return home. 40 of these children have been at the Shelter before and were repatriated by CEDAG, so it seems like a vicious circle as some of them have been returned to Senegal twice already. The children told DSW that they never received their reintegration package. An additional 16 children from the same village were found by the police in a raid last week, of which DSW was not informed beforehand. They are being held at the police station in Banjul as the Shelter 'doesn't have enough security to guarantee that they won't escape'. If the police will provide security officers or funding, the Shelter will look after them.

According to DSW, the children received money from their mothers to come to The Gambia and they were working in restaurants in Banjul and the Kombo's and in the fish market. They earned between 30 and 50 Dalasis a day, and sent some of it back to their families. They were sleeping rough. Ten employers are in custody and the Gambia Immigration Department want to prosecute them for child labour. The Governor of the URR has been in touch with the Governor of Njamakuta. The children will be send back in 2 buses on Thursday morning and will be handed over to the Senegalese authorities. A delegation of four Senegalese government officials, including the Director of Social Welfare, are coming to Banjul on Thursday to discuss the matter. CEDAG has asked the DSW not to repatriate the children on Thursday but this was refused as this is an executive order. CEDAG will not provide financial support as the children do not want to return to Senegal and forced returns are against their policies and international human rights standards.

The Director of SW proposes to undertake a rapid assessment study of the situation but only wants to start after the children have been repatriated, which means that the children's views will not be included. At the meeting, I took the opportunity to ask the Director to explain to us why it is not child trafficking in her view. She answered that this is because the parents agreed with the children moving to The Gambia and there was no organized network or gang. I read out article 38(c) of the TIP Act 2007 and told her that the Gambian law is very clear about what constitutes child trafficking. I said that the employers can be classified as traffickers as they recruited/harboured these children, who were vulnerable and living on the streets, and do not speak English or any local language. I said it was not up to any of us to decide what establishes trafficking, but up to NAATIP. I asked her to work with NAATIP and not to exclude the possibility of child trafficking before an investigation has started.

I briefed the National Director and we drafted an email together which he will send to the Director of SW today. We proposed the following. ChildFund Senegal has previously implemented a child trafficking project in the country. We will ask them to work with us to support DSW with repatriation and reintegration of the children into their communities in Njamakuta village. In this way, we can work with the families and the children to ensure a durable solution (in the best interest of the child) can be found, and the children will not return to The Gambia within the next couple of months. One of these solutions would be to support the families to send their children back to school. Perhaps CEDAG will be willing to support this idea as well.

This cooperation with ChildFund Senegal could be done as part of the rapid assessment study, and we can monitor how the children are doing after the government has returned them to Senegal. UNICEF is looking for funds for the assessment. The PROTECT Project has funds available to support FTR of trafficked children and we do want to ensure that the case will be investigated and possibly prosecuted before this money is made available.

The children at the Shelter do not have enough clothing and food so I hope ChildFund will make some emergency money available for this.