Vienna (Austria), 30 October 2022
On the margins of the 11th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime (UNTOC), the Permanent Mission of Costa Rica, with the support of the Permanent Missions of Honduras and the Maldives, and the Human Trafficking and Migrant Smuggling Section of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), organized a side event to present the results achieved by the STARSOM initiative during its first year of implementation.
More than 50 participants, attending in person and on-line, listened to prosecutors and investigators from Costa Rica, Nigeria and Sri Lanka discussing how STARSOM has supported them to better understand the crime of migrant smuggling, including its gender and human rights dimensions, to improve South-South cooperation to tackle transcontinental smuggling routes from South Asia to North America.
Speakers and panellists also highlighted the importance of STARSOM in efforts to combat migrant smuggling in their countries.
Ambassador Alejandro Solano Ortiz, Permanent Representative of Costa Rica to the United Nations (UN) in Vienna, underlined that bilateral cooperation is key to tackle migrant smuggling, giving the example of the meeting between Costa Rica and Bangladesh that was organized by STARSOM in Vienna in April 2022.
“In combatting migrant smuggling efforts made in isolation are destined to fail,” said Patrick Segsworth, Deputy Director of the Anti-Crime Capacity Building Programme at Global Affairs Canada.
“South-South cooperation is paramount in countering the phenomenon, not only to prevent and disrupt migrant smuggling ventures, but also to increase investigation and prosecution of criminals,” he added.
Maldivian Ambassador Asim Ahmed noted that the exceptional scale and resilient nature of migrant smuggling networks pose numerous challenges for law enforcement authorities. He also congratulated UNODC for having been instrumental through the STARSOM initiative in assisting beneficiary countries improve their responses to these challenges.
The focus placed by STARSOM on the human rights of smuggled persons was highlighted by Deputy Minister of Security of Honduras, Julissa Villanueva, who stated that “to prevent and combat the smuggling of migrants, it is very important to guarantee the protection of their rights. South-south cooperation between authorities is essential to end this crime.”
In her intervention, Eugenia Salazar, Deputy Prosecutor of the Prosecutor’s Office against Trafficking in Persons and Migrant Smuggling in Costa Rica, praised the transformative methodology used by STARSOM in the six mentoring activities carried out in Costa Rica, and stressed the importance of focusing on smuggled persons, victims of aggravated forms of migrant smuggling and how they affect women and men differently.
Salazar also reported that STARSOM helped establish a multidisciplinary task force against migrant smuggling and aggravated migrant smuggling in an area of the Atlantic coast where no cases had been detected.
With the support of the initiative, investigators and prosecutors involved in the task force detected 9 cases of migrant smuggling, leading to the opening of 4 investigations and the arrest of 10 suspects.
Salazar noted that an institutionalization of the task force approach and its replication in other border areas of Costa Rica would be most welcome.
President’s Counsel and Additional Solicitor General at the Attorney’s General Department in Sri Lanka, Harippriya Jayasundara, presented the positive results of STARSOM's support in terms of strengthening communication channels and information exchange.
Jayasundara referred to the multilateral meeting held in Dubai and bilateral meetings with Maldives, Colombia and Dominican Republic, held earlier in 2022. "The meetings with Maldives, Colombia and Dominican Republic allowed us to identify new migrant smuggling routes and patterns that had emerged from Sri Lanka to Latin America via West African countries," she said. “The information we received allowed us to open an investigation into migrant smuggling networks operation in the country”, she added.
STARSOM is a two-year (2021-2023) project to counter migrant smuggling and protect the lives and rights of migrants across routes leading to North America and crossing multiple countries in South Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean.
STARSOM is funded by the Government of Canada through its Anti-Crime Capacity Building Program (ACCBP).
