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Huffinton Post, Amazon and other sites seem to promote sex tourism, as defined by proposal
Chinchilla administration moves against sex tourism
By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
The central government wants to jail anyone who promotes Costa Rica as a sex tourism destination. That is part of a lengthy proposal for a trafficking-in-persons law that Casa Presidencial has kept on ice for more than a year but authorized its publication in the La Gaceta official newspaper Thursday.
The measure also seeks to raise the airport exit tax from $26 to $27 with the extra dollar going to support a new Instituto Nacional contra la Trata de Personas.
In a summary of the law, which is being sent to the Asamblea Nacional, those who drafted the document report that there only were two cases of sexual exploitation and two cases of labor exploitation in the last decade. In all, the authors said, there were 50 related cases in the last decade and at least 14 that involved trafficking in persons.
News files show only three major case. One was in 2003 when police found nine Ch*ldren, two weeks to 20 months old, at a La Uruca home. They were on their way to adoptions in the developed world. The legislation proposed Thursday also covers what it calls irregular adoptions. This year investigators found Asian fishermen working in what they said was servitude on boats in Puntarenas.
There also was a case in México in which two Costa Rica women said they were tricked by promises of good jobs to go there and then they were forced into prostitution.
Since a new immigration law went into effect in 2006 trafficking in persons has been punishable as a crime. The immigration law that went into effect March 1 continues that penalty. But some of those facing that charge have been individuals caught driving a car or microbus filled with willing Nicaraguan illegal immigrants.
The summary of the proposed legislation says that the real statistics of human trafficking are much higher and hidden.
The proposal also would provide temporary residency and other benefits to those considered victims of trafficking organizations. Some 20 percent of the proposed institute's budget is allocated as a fund for victims. The protection goes so far as to forbid disclosure of complainants' names or to facilitate interviews with the news media. In court cases, trafficking complainants would testify in private. If they are under age, even the suspects would be barred from the testimony, under terms of the proposal.
The edict against sexual tourism is so broad it probably will not withstand constitutional review:
Article 8 of the proposed Chapter Three says that anyone who promotes or carries out programs, campaigns, publicity announcements, making use of any medium to project the country at the national and international level as a tourist destination accessible for commercial sexual exploitation or
prostitution of persons of whatever age or sex shall be penalized with from four to eight years of prison.
The following article expands the range of suspects to those who own, rent, possess or administer an establishment or place designed for or benefiting from the trafficking of persons or related activities.
As always, there are definitional problems with the law, in part because prostitution is not prosecuted here and many persons adopt that lifestyle willingly.
The proposal defined trafficking in persons as promoting, facilitating or favoring the entrance to or exit from the country or movement within the country of persons of whatever sex to do one or various acts of prostitution or to submit them to exploitation, sexual or labor dependency, slavery or similar practices to slavery, forced work or service, submissive marriage, begging, illegal extraction of organs or irregular adoption.
By that definition the major airlines are vulnerable to the stipulated six to 10 years in jail. But elsewhere in the body of the proposal is a series of definitions in which situations like forced pregnancy, forced prostitution and forced labor are defined. Promotion prostitution of und***ge individuals is penalized with longer prison terms, under the proposal.
The proposal provides that those arrested for these crimes cannot bargain their way out of the case through the usual judicial conciliation process. No punishment is ordered for those who are described as victims even if they committed crimes as a consequence of the trafficking experience.
The proposed law appears to have been put in final form in 2009. Then-president Óscar Arias Sánchez and Janina del Vecchio, the security minister at the time, signed the document. However, the documents seems to have been studied by the Comisión Especial de Seguridad Nacional, which was headed then by the current president, Laura Chinchilla. There was no mention of the proposal until Thursday.
There was no explanation why Casa Presidencial sat on the document for so many months.
As with all proposals, legislative committees will study it, make changes and additions and may not even vote on it.
Casa Presidencial said that the bill was a product of a national coalition that included input from the United Nations and International Organization for Migration.
President Chinchilla said during her campaign that she saw casinos as centers of prostitution. If passed, this proposal may be used as a weapon against casinos, bars and other locations that allow prostitutes to solicit business.
Usually unmentioned are the many illegal houses of prostitution that dot the metro area and the nightclubs where prostitution is tolerated
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That's a little paranoid don't ya think? 
