Thursday, February 25, 2016

Ukrainian State Programme of Combating Trafficking until 2020

Since my current book project looks at why countries adopt human trafficking policy I always find it interesting when one of my case studies adopts a new law related to human trafficking. Before I went to Ukraine in 2013 it was really difficult to find out about the kinds of trafficking laws that they had. It took me a while to weed through things and locate the laws in a brand new country. Fast forward to 2016, after two research trips to Ukraine, I found out that they adopted a new State Programme of Combating Trafficking until 2020 from the Ministry of Social Policy's facebook page! It is amazing how much more transparent the new regime is on new policy adoptions and that after living there and conducting research how much easier it is to find out this information.

We have been waiting for the new state programme to be adopted since the end of the last state programme ended in 2015. When I visited Ukraine last summer the Ministry of Social Policy seemed very preoccupied with the Internally Displaced Persons crisis and their attention was shifted elsewhere. So it was great to see that on February 24, 2016, the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine adopted the Resolution "On approval of the State Programme of Combating Trafficking 2020." This programme will determine the Ukrainian government's work to combat trafficking over the next four years. It outlines a number of specific measures to combat human trafficking and gives a number f responsibilities to the central and local executive authorities. The goal of the state programme is to "prevent human trafficking, increasing the efficiency of detection of persons who commit the offense or contributing to their occurrence, protection of and assistance to victims of trafficking" (Ministry of Social Policy 2016). Since I look for the reasons why countries adopt policy it was interesting that the Ministry identified that it was "developed in pursuant to paragraphs 50 and 51 of the National Action Plan to implement the second phase of the Action Plan to liberalize the EU visa regime for Ukraine" (Ministry of Social Policy 2016). Which supports the argument in my book that the biggest influence on Ukraine with respect to policy adoption was the EU visa free regime.

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