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Fostering Awareness of New Ethiopian Law on Human Trafficking and Migrant Smuggling 

After joining hands with the Government to come up with a new legislation against trafficking in persons and migrant smuggling, UNODC has set in motion pivotal activities to raise awareness and strengthen knowledge of the text among Ethiopian legal practitioners.

Some 70 prosecutors, judges and police investigators from various regions of Ethiopia were trained from 7 to 16 September on the contents of the new law as well as its potential for implementation.

Organized with Ethiopia's Justice Organs Professionals Training Center, the workshops included practical exercises on how to conduct interviews to suspects and witnesses, examine crime scenes, as well as on case and trial preparation, among others things.

One of the participants, Abdullaziz Mohammed, a public prosecutor from Harar, in eastern Ethiopia, stressed that through the trainings, he "got to know the new law and differentiate between trafficking and smuggling;" adding: "This knowledge will be really useful in my day-to-day work as I have learned the techniques to examine the cases, bring them to justice and penalize the criminals."

Atakilh Teka, from the Police Training Center in the northern Tigray region, painted at first a gloomy picture of the situation: "We have seen many trafficking cases, but due to a lack of legislation and little investigative capacity, many of them could not move forward." Yet he was hopeful that the new legislation and the tools learned on how to go about the investigation process would help reverse that picture and "minimize the problem."

Consistent with the "training of trainers" model, the knowledge gained by the participants is expected to cascade down to hundreds of their colleagues in each of Ethiopia's different regions.

Eyosyas Demissie, a public prosecutor from the northern Amhara region, was ready: "My mission is to introduce the new law and train 500 colleagues in my region, he said. To do so, he found the training "very helpful as it covered all stages, from investigating to proving every single element of trafficking in court so that a case do not be dismissed."

"I will definitely be more competent to prosecute cases than I was before," he concluded.

The project is supported by the EU.