Human Trafficking

The court in Bruges also ordered Vo Van Hong, 45, to pay a 920,000 euro (NZ$1.5 million) fine and gave prison terms of between 18 months and 10 years to 17 others for their roles in large-scale people smuggling from Vietnam to Britain.

The three-judge panel said in a ruling that ran to 234 pages that those convicted had cynically exploited the victims, who were each charged nearly 25,000 euros for the trip to Britain, and treated them as a dehumanised cargo.

The Hastings-based Samoan chief, Joseph Auga Matamata, was sentenced on Monday to 11 years in prison and ordered to pay over $NZ183,000 in reparations to his 13 victims.

It comes as The Samoa Observer reported that some of his victims thought it his punishment was too light.

But immigration officials who worked closely with his victims during the three-year investigation told RNZ that was not the feedback they had.

Joseph Auga Matamata, was sentenced on Monday to 11 years in a New Zealand prison and ordered to pay over $NZ183,000 in reparations to his victims.

The Samoa Observer newspaper spoke to a woman who was taken to New Zealand by Matamata, with her younger brother, when she was 15.

She said 11 years was too short for what he had put them through.

A relative of the victim said he had hurt a lot of people, including children, and deserved a longer sentence.

The group told officials at Brisbane airport that they had arrived to cover the Commonwealth Games.

If convicted of human trafficking, the journalist, who had a valid media pass, faces up to 20 years in jail.

The Commonwealth Games will be held in Australia's Gold Coast between 4 and 15 April.

The group had travelled through Bangkok, where officials suspected them of carrying fraudulent documents and alerted authorities in Australia.

Police say the man, 27, used threats, coercion and deception to force his wife and two-month-old girl to leave against the woman's will in March.

He then allegedly tried to cancel his India-born wife's Australian visa.

The man faced a Sydney court on Tuesday on three charges, including human trafficking and forgery of documents.

"It is a disturbing case where we see a victim and their young child transported from Australia to a foreign jurisdiction without any means for them to return home," said Australian Federal Police Supt Dan Evans.

This act has truly become a global threat to vulnerable men, women and children. It has become a wrong that affects millions of people every year.

A three-day workshop is being conducted by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) for police investigators and prosecutors.

The objective of the workshop is to enhance and identify cases of human trafficking in PNG following the increased instances of trafficking in the country.

And these countries have poor social and economic system, high rates of poverty, under-resourced judiciary and government agencies, and inadequate laws, among others.

This was part of the presentation by the acting Chief Executive Officer of Pacific Dialogue Limited Ms Patricia Kailola, when speaking on The Hidden Crime of Human Trafficking in the Pacific Islands Region, at the 2016 Pacific Update Conference at The University of the South Pacific (USP) in Suva on Tuesday.

The court in the central Hungarian city of Kecskemet made the ruling Tuesday.

The finding is one of many to feature in a report by the aid agency Save The Children, based on a wide ranging exploration of child trafficking practices in the Solomons.

Researchers discovered that some logging site managers have been finding children for some of their laregely foreign workforce, and there are also reports of girls being recruited for sexual exploitation in Honiara schools.

The country ranks the worst out of all island Pacific nations in the US State Department's Trafficking in Persons Report 2015.

The Marshall Islands' poor record revolves around the capital Majuro's role as a port of call for foreign fishing and transhipping vessels.

It says Marshall Islands girls are recruited by foreign business owners to engage in prostitution with crew members of the vessels.

It also says some Chinese women are recruited with promises of legitimate work and forced into prostitution after paying large recruitment fees.