The Vanishing Sex Slaves

Inquiry fails to find single trafficker who forced anybody into prostitution | UK news | The Guardian

The UK's biggest ever investigation of sex trafficking failed to find a single person who had forced anybody into prostitution in spite of hundreds of raids on sex workers in a six-month campaign by government departments, specialist agencies and every police force in the country.

The failure has been disclosed by a Guardian investigation which also suggests that the scale of and nature of sex trafficking into the UK has been exaggerated by politicians and media.

Current and former ministers have claimed that thousands of women have been imported into the UK and forced to work as sex slaves, but most of these statements were either based on distortions of quoted sources or fabrications without any source at all.

Goodness, who would have thought the government and media were such a bunch of useless, lying bastards?

Someone better tell the Swedes, who're promoting their Stockholm Programme, one of whose major aims is to prevent people trafficking.

Via Anticant's Arena.

You Can't Trust The Fucking Swedes Either

As if having the Franco-German axis throwing its weight around in the EU Empire weren't enough, the Swedes have decided they want part of the action as well.

Hence The Stockholm Programme:

The Stockholm Programme is to define the framework for EU police and customs cooperation, rescue services, criminal and civil law cooperation, asylum, migration and visa policy for the period 2010–2014. The Programme was discussed at the informal ministerial meeting in Stockholm in July 2009 and will ultimately be adopted by EU Heads of State and Government at the Summit in December 2009.

In a preamble document there's the statement:

Migration issues are also high on the list of priorities. The EU must attract more immigrant labour so that bottlenecks in the labour market can be eliminated and more people can find work.

You may wish to issue a loud "what the fuck?", just as I did. In other words, under Lisbon there'll be a common rule preventing individual members from regulating immigration into their own states from outside the EU.

It's also ironic that this is all towards making "an open and more secure Europe" while they're talking about increasing surveillance, for instance.

They're also mightily obsessed with people-trafficking, this being one of the current fashionable hobby-horses of interfering neo-liberal progressive types.

I've gone right off the Swedes.

On a more optimistic note: the Romanian courts are rejecting the EU's data retention directive:

Members of EDRi, European Digital Rights, and the press are reporting that Romania’s constitutional courts are blocking Data Retention. Their decision could lead to restoration of privacy rights in the UK and across Europe.

The Romanian courts have concluded that retention of data identifying who individuals send email communications to is a breach of their fundamental right to secrecy of correspondence.

Europeans and UK citizens have this right enshrined in Article 8 of the European Convention of Human Rights.

As Romania is a member of the EU, this may mean they have to challenge the Directive through the EU court system, if they wish to defend their court's decision, and if they succeed, the Directive itself would have to be revised or repealed. It is by now law in nearly all EU states, with the notable exception of Sweden. German citizens are also trying to challenge its constitutionality on privacy grounds.

The Directive was challenged by Ireland on a narrower basis, but the door was left open for a human rights challenge. ORG and over forty other civil liberties groups made this case in a joint submission at the time.

Update: campaigners are waiting to see exactly what the judgement says, but warn that Romania may not take a challenge to the EU, but may simply not implement the directive.

Small country. Let's see if they get the usual EU bullying treatment.

Anyway, fuck the Swedes and hurrah for the Romanians.