Foreign Min., Cabinet cooperate to combat human trafficking

CAIRO – 2 May 2018: Egypt’s Foreign Ministry announced cooperating with the Cabinet to adopt a new mechanism to protect Egyptian employees abroad from human trafficking.

In a press statement on Wednesday, the Foreign Ministry said that it has coordinated with the National Coordinating Committee for Preventing and Combating Illegal Migration (NCCPIM) to distribute a guidebook released by the committee that aims to protect expatriates from the crime of human trafficking.

Authorities have already started to distribute the guidebook, according to state-owned Al-Ahram.

The guidebook mainly includes the international legal framework to protect expatriates, in addition to the international judicial cooperation to combat human trafficking, the statement read.

It also includes the role assigned to the NCCPIM and the foreign affairs, manpower, and immigration and expatriate affairs ministries to protect Egyptians abroad.

In May 2016, Minister of Immigration Nabila Makram said that there were about 2,500 Egyptian kids who have illegally fled Egypt to Italy, and that some people there push these children to work in drug trafficking and prostitution.

The Guardian reported in 2015 that smugglers in Egypt and Libya use children to lead the ships transferring illegal immigrants to Italy.