London :

Time is up for sexual predators in the aid sector, Britain’s development minister said on Thursday, as she announced new measures to clamp down on sexual abuse and exploitation after a series of scandals.

Penny Mordaunt said it was a “pivotal moment” for the aid industry ahead of an international summit on the issue where the British government will announced details of a joint initiative with Interpol to stop sexual predators from getting jobs.

“This a moment to say: ‘No more’. We have to give the people that we are here to help the protection that they need,” she said in a statement.

Revelations earlier this year that Oxfam staff used prostitutes in Haiti snowballed into widespread reports of misconduct in the aid sector, plunging it into the global spotlight.

Organisations have since pledged to do more to flush out offenders, but Britain’s charity watchdog said on Wednesday it believed a significant number of incidents still went unreported.

Britain’s Department for International Development (DFID) said on Thursday it would work with Interpol on a 10 million pound ($13.14 million) pilot project to strengthen the vetting of aid workers through an online platform.

Aid agencies could require future employees to be checked against national criminal records and Interpol databases under the scheme, named Operation Soteria after the Greek goddess of safety.

“Our message to sexual predators using the sector as a cover for their crimes is ‘Your time is up’,” said Mordaunt.

An August survey by the Thomson Reuters Foundation found aid agencies expected reports of sexual misconduct to rise as they cracked down on staff offences and improved safeguarding mechanisms.

An earlier poll had found more than 120 staff from 21 leading global charities were fired or lost their jobs in 2017 over sexual misconduct.

Operation Soteria is to be led by Interpol, with help from Britain’s criminal records office (ACRO). Save the Children will coordinate the participating charities.

A team of up to nine detectives will also be deployed in two regional hubs in Africa and Asia to help poorer countries improve their criminal records systems, DFID said.

It was not immediately clear when the project - set to last five years - would start and what the terms of participation of other nations were. Britain said it was to commit 2 million pounds for the scheme’s first year.

“A critical part of Interpol’s mission is to protect the most vulnerable members of society from the most dangerous,” Interpol secretary general Jurgen Stock said in a statement.

“This is all the more important when sexual predators attempt to exploit the very people – be it men, women or children - they are supposed to be safeguarding from harm.”

Kabul :

An Afghan lawmaker contesting this week's parliamentary elections was among five people killed on Wednesday by a bomb planted under his office chair, officials said, an attack claimed by the Taliban.

The MP, Abdul Jabar Qahraman, was killed as he prepared for Saturday's election, a senior government official said, becoming the 10th candidate killed in the past two months, with two more abducted and four wounded by hardline Islamist militants.

"Such brutal acts of the terrorists and their supporters cannot weaken people's trust in the peaceful and democratic processes," President Abdul Ghani said in a statement condemning the attack.

The Afghan Taliban claimed responsibility for the blast in the southern province of Helmand, saying in a statement, "We have killed Qahraman, a renowned communist." The Taliban have ordered Afghans to boycott the much-delayed parliamentary polls in their battle to overthrow the Western-backed government and establish their own Islamist regime.

Four men sitting in Qahraman's office at the time were also killed, said interior ministry spokesman Nasrat Rahimi, adding that police had arrested three suspects in the provincial capital of Lashkar Gah.

The blast wounded seven people, said Omar Zwak, a spokesman for the provincial governor.

"A bomb was placed below Qahraman's chair in his campaign office," he added. "We are investigating the incident." Wednesday's blast follows the deaths of 22 people last week in an explosion at an election rally for a woman candidate in the northeastern province of Takhar.

Beijing :

Amid global criticism, China justified its controversial move to keep thousands of Uygur Muslims in “vocational training institutions” in the volatile Xinjiang region, insisting that its stringent measures have prevented terror attacks in the province in the last 21 months.

Xinjiang, bordering Afghanistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, has been restive for the past several years over protests from Uygur Muslims, an ethnic group of over 10 million Turkik origin people, over the large scale settlements of Han Chinese from other provinces.

China blamed the recurring violent attacks including in Beijing and elsewhere in the country on the separatist East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM), an al-Qaeda linked group, whose cadres were now stated to be fighting along with Islamic State (IS) in Syria.

The UN Human Rights panel reported in August that China has detained over a million Uygur Muslims in re-education camps which are also called indoctrination camps, sparking an international outcry.

The UN's Geneva-based Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination has said it was alarmed by "numerous reports of ethnic Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities" being detained in Xinjiang region and called for their immediate release.

Estimates about them "range from tens of thousands to upwards of a million," it said.

While the Foreign Ministry in the past refuted the allegations and defended the crackdown, a top Chinese official from Xinjiang in a rare interview to the state-run Xinhua news agency on Tuesday said that now the province is free from the violence.                

“Now Xinjiang is generally stable, with the situation under control and improving. In the past 21 months, no violent terrorist attacks have occurred and the number of criminal cases, including those endangering public security, has dropped significantly," said Shohrat Zakir, chairman of the Government of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.

An Uygur himself, Zakir said public security has notably improved with religious extremism effectively contained, while people are now feeling more secure.

“We have laid a good foundation for completely solving the deeply-rooted problems that affect the region's long-term stability," he said.

Acknowledging the camps in which thousands were kept for re-education, Zakir described them as "professional vocational training institutions" which focussed on "the country's common language, legal knowledge, vocational skills, along with de-extremisation education".

The centres are for "people influenced by terrorism and extremism", he said.

He, however, avoided any description of the "de-extremisation" education. Former detainees have told the international media that they were forced to denounce their faith and pledge loyalty to the ruling Communist Party of China.

Zakir said the vocational training included courses aimed at teaching skills to work in factories, including garment making, food processing, electronic product assembly, typesetting and printing, hairdressing and e-commerce, with companies apparently paying for products made by the "trainees".

He is the first top Chinese official to speak publicly about the widely criticised camps, as China comes under increasing international pressure with US threatening sanctions.

UN Human Rights High Commissioner Michelle Bachelet has said that the Chinese government's arbitrary detention of Muslims is worrying and China should allow UN monitors into Xinjiang.

Maya Wang, a senior China researcher at Human Rights Watch, said Beijing's "clumsy justifications" were clearly a response to condemnation from the international community but would not blunt criticism.  

“These camps remain blatantly unlawful and arbitrary under both Chinese and international law; and the suffering and abuses of what is estimated to be one million people in them cannot be wiped away through propaganda," she was quoted as saying by Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post.

Zakir said that according to feedback from the vocational education and training institutions, some trainees have come close to or reached the completion standard agreed in the training agreements.

They are expected to complete their courses successfully by the end of this year, he said.

“We are busy with their employment arrangements,” he added.

London :

Sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll — nothing new for the hospitality industry but British hoteliers say loud music, used condoms and alcohol could hint at something darker: modern-day slavery.

Add last-minute bookings, paying in cash or landing without luggage — all are warning signs that human traffickers could be using the cover of hotel life to hold, abuse and sell victims.

Yet for hotel bosses — this is just the tip of the iceberg.

For modern slavery poses a triple threat to the hospitality industry, from people being sexually exploited in hotel rooms to goods made via global supply chains that are tainted by forced labour and sub-contracted workers at risk of coercion and abuse.

Many hotels in Britain are teaching staff to spot the signs, and scrutinising suppliers of goods from shampoo to sheets.

But exploitation of their employees is the insidious threat.

Countless hotels are in the dark about the backgrounds of their workforce — and may be inadvertently hiring slaves, experts say.

“Outsourced staff are a key risk in supply chains in the hospitality industry when it comes to modern slavery,” said Dominic Fitzgerald, development director at Shiva Hotels group.

“Unfortunately, responding to modern slavery is not something that is driven hard enough within the industry - there is no legal requirement,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a plush bar at a Hilton hotel near London’s Heathrow Airport.

Many major hotels in Britain hand control of their workforce to recruitment agencies - leaving mainly low-skilled and migrant workers vulnerable to debt bondage, poor pay and long hours, and working under duress to fill the pockets of their traffickers.

The hospitality sector employs at least 3.2 million people in a country estimated by rights group Walk Free Foundation to be home to 1,36,000 slaves — with the crime growing and evolving.

But many industry firms focus on the source of their goods rather than their staff - either unaware of the risk of abuse or unwilling to pay more to address the threat, according to Andrew Crane, an academic at Bath University and labour issues expert.

“To prevent the misery of modern slavery from blighting our workforces ... companies need to be able to trace the origin of their employees in the same way as most can for their products.”

Less talk, more action

Hospitality is one of Britain’s top employers and fastest growing sectors, worth 130 billion pounds ($172 billion) and set to create 5,00,000-plus new jobs by 2021, the trade body says.

Traffickers are already deeply embedded, and an estimated 93,000 people are sexually exploited in hotels across Europe each year, according to a study funded by the European Union.

A gang member who trafficked 19 Asian women to Britain and sold them for sex in hotels in a dozen cities was jailed in 2017 for four years in a case police and prosecutors said exploited the hospitality sector in an “organised operation”.

But several big players have joined forces to fight back.

The Stop Slavery Hotel Industry Network was founded in 2016 by the Shiva Foundation - an anti-trafficking group funded by Shiva Hotels — to boost ethical recruitment and root out abuse, promote responsible supply chains and tackle sex trafficking.

Thousands of hotel staff in Britain - from cooks to cleaners - are being trained to identify possible trafficking signals, such as excess alcohol in a room, or a child staying over.

Yet too few hotels - big or small - are doing enough to ensure their own workers are safe from exploitation, said Martin Birch, head of WGC, an outsourced cleaning services provider.

“Modern slavery has become a hot topic, but hotels need to go a lot further,” said Birch, who employs about 5,000 staff.

His workers are sometimes nervous on first joining, having suffered abuse from former bosses, seen their pay withheld or deducted, and faced threats of eviction from staff quarters.

So WGC pairs new hires with older staff for reassurance, offers a helpline for staff to report complaints, and once even saved a worker from the clutches of traffickers, Birch said.

With many firms paying lip service to the threat ahead of Anti-Slavery Day on Oct. 18, Birch urged concrete action.

“(Modern slavery) is not another health and safety type of heading. It needs to be eradicated ... not just spoken about.”

Sustainability to slavery

Insiders say some hotels are knowingly passing the buck.

“Hotels must stop hiding behind contracts - they should have direct contact with all workers rather than absolving themselves of responsibility,” said Peter McAllister of the Ethical Trading Initiative, a group of trade unions, companies and charities.

“It is primarily a question of political will and money – and legal liability in some cases,” the chief executive said.

An ongoing review into the 2015 Modern Slavery Act — which requires firms with a turnover of at least 36 million pounds to report on their anti-slavery efforts - could see the law strengthened and force companies to do more, he added.

Hotel bosses said sustainability had been the sector’s watchword in recent years - from sourcing organic produce to encouraging guests to reuse towels to help the environment - and that slavery now deserved similar scrutiny and robust action.

“It used to be the case that hotel chefs could tell you the name of the cow behind the piece of beef on your plate, but not the names of the housekeeping team,” said Fitzgerald of Shiva.

“Yet that is changing.”

The industry is also mulling how Brexit - Britain’s planned 2019 departure from the European Union - and the rise of short-term home rental companies like AirBnB may affect worker rights and abuses, as well as sex trafficking in hospitality, he added.

For 20-year-old Theodore Melbourne, a part-time cleaner with WGC who works at a Hilton when not at university, such concerns are beyond him as he goes about his daily housekeeping routine.

After being misled and underpaid at another hotel, he is simply content to have an employer who treats him with respect.

“The job is great - it is a friendly, positive environment,” he said while making up a hotel bed. “It just feels right here.” (Thomson Reuters Foundation)

Washington :

Anyone entering the US illegally would be arrested, detained and then deported back, President Donald Trump has warned, as he threatened three Central American nations to halt a migrant caravan from heading to America or lose millions of dollars in foreign aid.

Trump’s warning comes amidst reports that a new migrant caravan from Honduras comprising about 1,600 people is moving towards the US via Guatemala.

The caravan, formed in the Honduran city of San Pedro Sula on Saturday, crossed into Guatemala on Monday. Guatemala detained one of its coordinators on Tuesday, but other members of the caravan are advancing through Guatemala with hopes of reaching the US border.

“Anybody entering the United States illegally will be arrested and detained, prior to being sent back to their country!” Trump said in a late-night tweet.

He said his administration has informed the three countries - Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador – that America will stop all payments to them if they allow their citizens to enter the US.

“We have today informed the countries of Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador that if they allow their citizens, or others, to journey through their borders and up to the United States, with the intention of entering our country illegally, all payments made to them will STOP (END)!” Trump said in another tweet.

In 2017, the US gave USD 248 million to Guatemala, USD 175 million to Honduras and USD 115 million to El Salvador in foreign aid.

Vice President Mike Pence also tweeted earlier, saying that he had spoken with Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez and Guatemalan President Jimmy Morales.

He said Trump’s message to Honduras also applied to Guatemala, “no more aid if it’s not stopped!”

“Spoke with Guatemalan President Jimmy Morales about caravan heading for the US and made clear our borders and sovereignty must be maintained. We expect our partners to do all they can to assist and appreciate their support. Reiterated POTUS’ message: no more aid if it’s not stopped!” Pence tweeted.

This caravan’s emergence comes nearly six months after another caravan consisting largely of Honduran immigrants reached the US-Mexico border.

Its formation also comes just weeks before high-stakes midterm elections in the United States, in which many Republican candidates have been echoing President Trump’s message of boosting border security and cracking down on illegal immigration.

Trump has been a fierce advocate of building a border wall with Mexico to tighten the US’ immigration controls.

He believes border security is a serious national issue and the lack of it poses a substantial threat to the “sovereignty and safety” of America and its citizens.

During his campaign, Trump tapped into the immigration concerns of many Americans who worry about loss of economic opportunities and the threat of criminals and terrorists entering the country.

His call for the construction of a border wall was one of his most popular proposals and helped the billionaire tycoon to galvanise masses.