Sex cafes the new scourge

THE NUMBER of cabarets and artistes has fallen in Cyprus but sex trafficking is managing to find new outlets through bars and even rural coffee shops dubbed ‘sex cafes’, the House Crime Committee heard yesterday.
The Committee heard that there has been a radical reduction in women arriving on the island as artistes, with 365 women currently registered in this category compared to around 1,200 in recent years. This is mainly due to a change in how the women are processed by the authorities, which has abolished the ‘artiste visa’
Deputies noted that even though efforts were being made by the current government – and some progress has been achieved  – Cyprus was still far from ridding itself of its bad reputation when it comes to human trafficking.
Committee Chairman, AKEL’s Yiannakis Thoma, said it was a fact that the government had taken specific measures over the past months – such as intensifying checks on artistes arriving on the island and increasing raids on cabarets. This, he said, has led to a reduction in the number of cabarets, as well as foreign women arriving on the island for this purpose.
“But at the same time, there has been an increase in the trafficking of women in other areas, such as bars and even cafeterias,” said Thoma. He said these women could be on the island on a temporary visa, or they may have been lured to Cyprus on the false pretence that they would be carrying out a fake marriage.
Authorities had noted an increase in women – Cypriot and European – as well as around 260 third-country nationals  working as “special barmaids”. Even worse, the Committee was told that rural cafeterias were filling up with European women.
 “We were told that a large number of these women, at the end of the day, are being sexually exploited and trafficked by specific rings,” said Thoma.
The Committee was also informed about a ruling last January by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), which has been deemed extremely damning for Cyprus and Russia. It involved the suspicious death in 2001 of a 20-year-old Russian woman – Oksana Rantseva in Cyprus. The Court ruled that the two countries had violated human trafficking regulations, as well as laws involving prostitution and forced labour.
 “Cypriot society’s traditional indifference and the hypocrisy of Cypriot governments on these matters of human trafficking were expressed in the most tragic manner with the Rantseva case, which involved a Russian woman who came to Cyprus to work as a waitress, was placed in a cabaret, managed to escape, only to be handed back to her exploiters by the police and in her attempt to escape again, she fell from a multi-storey hotel in Limassol and was found dead on the street,” said Thoma. “The case had basically been covered up by the police, who said it was a suicide case, an accident.”
Government officials – including spokesmen from the Interior and Justice Ministries, the Migration Department, the police, the Social Welfare Department and the Ombudswoman’s office – informed MPs on measures to combat the phenomenon – such as putting into use a 2007 law that enabled police to be more effective in their interventions and brought more criminals to justice.
Plans were also announced to amend labour laws involving foreign housemaids, who also often fall victim to sexual exploitation and are sometimes forced to work like slaves with little protection from the state’s legal system.
“We hope that these new measures will lead to the creation of a correct framework, with a strong basis; but a lot of work needs to be done until we completely combat the unacceptable phenomenon of trafficking women for prostitution,” said Thoma.
He also said there was another extremely serious dimension to the trafficking. “There is the trafficking of adults and children to secure vital organs, meaning people are falling victim to criminals, who basically take human vital organs such as the heart, liver or kidneys – either by threatening or killing them – to sell them to other criminals who have the money to buy them,” he said.