[Congressional Record Volume 149, Number 176 (Tuesday, December 9, 2003)]
[Senate]
[Pages S16107-S16108]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
THE TVPA REAUTHORIZATION
Mr. BROWNBACK. Mr. President, I am pleased to report the success of a
bipartisan effort in which Senators, Members of the House, their key
staff aides and a broad variety of religious and human rights groups
have engaged.
This effort has produced a greatly strengthened Trafficking Victims
Protection Reauthorization Act which has passed the House, and which it
is my honor to bring to the Senate floor. I am pleased to note that my
colleague, the distinguished Senator from New York, Mr. Schumer, has
joined me in cosponsoring this important legislation. The act will
greatly strengthen America's hand in combating the slavery issue and
the women's issue of our time--the annual trafficking of as many as 2
million women and children into sex and slave bondage. As such, this
act will give needed tools to President Bush, and to all future
Presidents, to take on the world's trafficking mafias and to protect
the traffickers' victims. It will thus also greatly facilitate the
pledge made by President Bush in his United Nations speech of September
23 to make the war against trafficking a major commitment of his
administration.
But I am pleased and deeply honored to bring this bill before my
colleagues for yet another reason--one that I know will resonate with
every Member of this body. Both in spirit and substance, the measure
now before the Senate captures the hopes and the ideals of Paul and
Sheila Wellstone, without whose passion and commitment no U.S. anti-
trafficking initiative against worldwide sex and slave trafficking
would have been possible. It is one of my greatest sources of
satisfaction and fulfillment as a member of this body to have worked
with Paul and with Sheila to sponsor the Trafficking Victims Protection
Act of 2000. In doing so, I and others were regularly inspired by these
two friends to go the extra mile for the bill. After our first Foreign
Relations Committee hearing on the bill, Paul remarked that the victims
who testified on behalf of the bill had produced his most moving
experience as a Senator. This says much about the man Paul was, and
about the manner in which his and Sheila's priorities were always
directed on behalf of abused, vulnerable, and powerless victims.
We honor Paul and Shelia today by taking up this bill. As pleased as
they would be by that gesture, it would be a much more meaningful
tribute if we are able to pass the Trafficking Victims Protection
Reauthorization Act, for there are a number of vital, strengthening
provisions in the act that will greatly improve the fight against
trafficking.
First, the Director of the State Department Office to Combat and
Monitor Trafficking in Persons has been raised to ambassadorial rank.
This step will elevate the status of the office precisely as it will
befit its present incumbent. John Miller, a former House Member known
to many of us, is an able, respected, committed, and moral man who is
now the Federal Government's chief antislavery and antitrafficking
official. He has served as head of the TIP Office with great
effectiveness and skill, and I am confident that, as Ambassador Miller,
he will continue to do so.
Next, the reauthorization act resolves one of the original act's
greatest operational failings by ensuring that ``Tier II''
designations--given to counties that neither satisfy the act's high
standards for anti-trafficking performance nor clearly merit the act's
automatic sanctions--will not become an overbroad catchill category.
Under the act, countries on the cusp of Tier III designations will be
placed in a Tier II Special Watch List category and their performance
in eliminating trafficking will be subject to special scrutiny, and the
issuance of a special February 1 progress report and designation
evaluation. Thus, the Special Watch List category will maintain strong
pressure on countries that may ``almost but not quite'' merit a
sanctions-bearing Tier III designation, and will permit clear
differentiation between those countries and others placed on Tier II
because they have not met the very high standards required for Tier I
designations.
Three points should be made in connection with the act's Special
Watch List category. First, countries otherwise meriting Tier III
designation but placed on the Tier II Special Watch List because they
have made section (e)(3)(A)(iii)(III) ``commitments . . . to take
additional future steps over the next year'' should only avoid Tier III
designation under extraordinary circumstances, and only where they are
engaged in implementing important and curative steps likely to be
rapidly completed. Next, the provisions of section (e)(3)(A)(iii)(II)
that authorize Special Watch List treatment of countries that have
failed to engage in increased efforts to limit trafficking, prosecute
traffickers and protect trafficking victims should not be construed to
automatically bar Tier II designations when such efforts have not been
made. Finally, to address a matter of legitimate concern to the State
Department, the act's mandate that special Feburary 1 reports are to be
issued for all Special Watch List countries needs to be understood in
terms of our intention that only countries on the Tier II-Tier III cusp
are to be the subjects of full and complete reports. Finally, as an
overall matter, it should be made clear that failure to be placed on
the Tier II Special Watch List will not bar a country from being placed
on Tier II in the following year.
A third major category of change established by the act involves the
establishment of additional ``minimum standards'' criteria for
determining appropriate tier designations. First, the reauthorization
makes clear that countries may not escape more severe tier designations
if they fail to keep meaningful records of what they have done to
investigate, prosecute, convict and otherwise monitor their performance
in the war against trafficking. Next, the reauthorization establishes
an ``appreciable progress'' standard evaluating a country's
performance--a standard not intended to exculpate countries still
significantly complicit in trafficking activities, but to ensure that
countries failing to make measurable progress on a year-to-year basis
will be negatively affected. In other words, the reauthorization
establishes a bottom-line ``performance standard'' to supplement the
original act's ``effort standards.'' Next, and critically, the
reauthorization adds a standard based
[[Page S16108]]
on the percentage of noncitizen trafficking victims. This provision was
added to permit the Trafficking Office to employ critical and needed
standards to evaluate the antitrafficking performance of countries that
have legitimized prostitution. Simply put, this provision both allows
and mandates the Trafficking Office to cut through dubious claims by
legalizing countries that they are providing meaningful protections to
their so-called ``sex workers.''
A final point with regard to the act's minimum standards criteria for
determining countries' tier status: It is the clear intent of the
Congress, and there should be no mistake about this, that compliance
with one or a few of the criteria does not, must not, lead to automatic
designation as a Tier I country. Likewise, compliance with one or a few
of the criteria shall not, must not, in and of inself shield countries
from Tier III designation. The designation process is intended to be
one of judgment and balance; and is not formulaic except to the intent
of creating a presumption that Tier I status should only be granted to
countries that comply with all of the minimum standards criteria.
Countries that deliberately and grossly violate ``only some'' of the
act's minimum standards criteria may be designated as Tier III
countries if this be the judgment of the Trafficking Office--a judgment
that should be exercised where there are gross and flagrant failures to
comply with other minimum standards criteria. And, as noted, compliance
with most of the statute's minimum standards criteria, combined with
even modes noncompliance with a remaining few, is not intended to
produce automatic Tier I designations.
Finally, a few words are in order regarding the Senior Policy
Operating Group created by this spring's Omnibus Appropriations Act,
which today's reauthorization bill both incorporates and strengthens.
While what I am about to say should be clear from the act's language,
and will be made explicit in the omnibus appropriations bill which the
Senate was unfortunately not able to enact today. While the omnibus
bill will take care of some of the issues related to the Senior Policy
Operating Group with explicit statutory language, I nonetheless believe
it important to make Congress's unmistakable intention clear in today's
floor statement.
First, it should be clear that Congress established the Senior Policy
Operating Group as the body it intended to coordinate all of the
Government's antitrafficing grants, policies and grant policies. The
Senior Policy Operating Group is comprised of senior political
appointees of each of the agencies with trafficking policy
responsibilities, and is thus perfectly structured to perform a vital
function of monitoring government-wide policy consistency. As presently
constituted, the Senior Policy Operating Group is made up of such
members as TIP Office Director John Miller, Deputy HHS Secretary Claude
Allen, Assistant Attorney General for Legal Policy Dan Bryant,
Assistant AID Administrator for Eastern Europe and Russia Kent Hill.
The committee meets on a regular basis and has produced an
extraordinary consensus, government-wide grant policy directive. Thus,
the Senior Policy Operating Group, including its chairman, John Miller,
can and must perform the function intended for it by Congress: to be
the sole and accountable body responsible for coordinating Federal
anti-trafficking policies, grants and grant policies. Having said this,
it should be noted that the coordinating responsibilities of the Senior
Policy Operating Group are not intended to supercede the decisionmaking
authority of the constituent members of the Task Force to Monitor and
Combat Trafficking in Persons, to whom operating group members continue
to report.
Finally, as should be clear from the language of the act, but as is
also worth unmistakably establishing, Congress did not intend that the
designation of grants and/or policies as being for ``public health'' or
like purposes should in any way remove such policies or grants from
Senior Policy Operating Group coordinating jurisdiction when those
policies or grants deal with the activities of traffickers, brothel
owners, pimps or the women and children from whose activities they
profit. It is vital for the Federal Government to make consistent and
otherwise harmonize its activities to stop the spread of communicable
disease and AIDS and its activities designed to prosecute traffickers
and eliminate trafficking. Both are vital objectives, and as recent
letters form the Moscow Duma have clearly shown, such harmonization is
imperatively pressing. Some persons may believe that forming
partnerships with traffickers, pimps, and brothel owners in order to
ensure use of clean needles and condoms, and doing so in a manner which
legitimizes the abusers and enslavers of women and children and shields
them from prosecution, is the way to go. They are wrong. Others may
believe that public health measurers to protect prostitutes from AIDS
always stand in the way of prosecuting the traffickers, pimps and
brothel owners who exploit them. They too are wrong. What Congress
intends is that a Senior Policy Operating Group comprised of political
appointees of all involved agencies is the body responsible for
harmonizing the above objectives into a single set of government-wide
policies.
All this said, I reiterate my belief that the memory and spirit of
Paul and Sheila Wellstone are alive in the bill before us, as are the
spirits of such activists as the great English Parliamentarian and
evangelist William Wilberforce, and the abolitionist leaders of my home
State of Kansas who led the 19th century war against the chattel
enslavement of African men and women. If we do it right, the
Trafficking Victims Protection Act will be seen by generations to come
to have met the high standards of William Wilberforce and the Free
Kansas activists. If we do it right, we will have created a true
monument to the memory of Paul and Sheila Wellstone. This act makes
this possible. I urge my colleagues to pass it.
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