People smuggling from RI a problem
for Australia

Although Australia records a small number of human trafficking cases coming from Indonesia, it says that incidence of human smuggling originating from Indonesian ports remains significant.

Human trafficking is defined as the recruitment, harboring, transportation or obtaining of a person through the use of force, fraud, or coercion for the purpose of subjection to involuntary servitude, prostitution or slavery. Human smuggling, on the other hand, involves the importation of people into a country via the deliberate evasion of immigration laws.

Australian Home Affairs Minister Bob Debus said that human smuggling is a special problem for his country, which sees a number of unauthorized boats carrying illegal immigrants coming from Indonesian ports.

"The amount of people smuggling from Asia, via and through Indonesia to Australia is significant, but it is smaller compared to, say, to the amount of people smuggling along the coast of Africa into Italy and Spain," he said Tuesday on the sidelines of the launch of a new computer-based training (CBT) center.

The center is located at the Bali Police Headquarters and features 20 new computers equipped with crime training program modules.

Modeled on the Jakarta Center for Law Enforcement Cooperation (JCLEC), Debus said the center aims to improve the capacity of the Indonesian National Police to fight against a range of transnational crimes.

"Today we are very pleased to be able to open a sa.tellite training facility for JCLEC here in Denpasar and later we hope to also open one in Kupang to help train local police," he said.

The launch coincided with the Third Bali Regional Ministerial Conference on People Smuggling, Trafficking in Persons and Related Transnational Crimes (Bali Process III), which is co-chaired by Australia and Indonesia in Nusa Dua on April 14 and 15.

The CBT center will include the human trafficking module, which was released worldwide by the United Nations Office for Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in 2007.

The Australian Federal Police and the Indonesian National Police are currently working with the UNODC to design and develop a people smuggling module along similar lines.

Bali Police Chief Insp. Gen. T. Ashikin Husein said 20 police officers had been trained to use the program in Semarang, Central Java.

"They will be responsible for training our police officers here," he said.