According to the report, released this week, Lithuania has made progress by enacting strong anti-trafficking laws, successfully prosecuting trafficking cases, funding a shelter and hotline for trafficking victims, funding a preventative educational campaign at schools, and helping to fund an anti-trafficking campaign carried out by NGOs.
The report acknowledges that the governments of Latvia and Estonia have made some progress in fighting trafficking, but it exposed areas where both countries need to improve in order to become more effective.
"The Latvian government gives human resources, but they have not yet given any funding to fight human trafficking," said Elina Niedre, the International Organi-zation for Migration's program director for Latvia.
"I suspect that in the future they will have to allocate funding to help the fight against trafficking."
Until recently, the Estonian government did not acknowledge the country's human trafficking problem. Like the other two Baltic countries, Estonia is a source country for women and girls trafficked for the purpose of sexual exploitation, according to the U.S. report.
The government recently extradited a man to the Nether-lands who was wanted for trafficking women, but like Latvia, it has yet to prosecute a single case of human trafficking in domestic courts.
There are 14 trafficking cases pending in Latvian courts. In one of the cases, the three men awaiting trial are accused of sending four young women to Germany where they worked as prostitutes. At the time that the three men were arrested, they were preparing to send three other girls - ages 12, 14 and 15 - to Germany to work as prostitutes. Two of the men charged were also charged with the rape of the 12- and 15-year-old girls.
Although Latvia enacted tough laws two years ago against the trafficking of individuals for sexual reasons, the prosecutor in charge of this particular case thinks that it will be difficult to win.
"Even though Latvia has some of the most progressive anti-trafficking laws in the world, prosecuting these cases will be difficult because we don't have any experience doing it," said Aivars Bergmanis, a prosecutor in Latvia's specialized prosecution office of organized crime.
According to the IOM, more trafficking victims come from Lithuania than from either of the other two Baltic countries, but the Lithuanian government has also gone further than governments of Estonia and Latvia to combat the problem. Earlier this year, Lithuanian prosecutors won their first three convictions against human traffickers.
"The Lithuanian government has made several changes to make the situation better than it currently is in Latvia and Estonia," said Audra Cipaviciene, head of the IOM's Lithuania branch. "The government has enacted a program that provides funding for educational programs where trafficking is discussed with especially vulnerable school children, it has enacted stronger legislation to prosecute offenders, and it is funding an NGO-run shelter for trafficking victims."
Although the Lithuanian government's actions are welcome, Cipaviciene feels that it needs to allocate more funding to the educational program in order to make it effective.
"Right now, there is only enough funding to go to about 20 schools, and that just isn't enough," said Cipaviciene.
GENDERS, an NGO in Riga, also provides shelter, job-training and counseling to trafficking victims, but neither the national nor the Riga government has provided it with any funding, and the NGO is in danger of running out of money.
Unlike Latvia and Estonia, which are classified as origin and transit countries, the State Depart-ment report deems Lithuania also a destination country for trafficking victims.
"There are a lot of women from Kaliningrad who get trafficked to the Klaipeda region in Lithuania," said Cipaviciene.
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