VIENNA, Oct 18, (KUNA): The five-day Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime started here Monday in the presence of more than 300 delegates and experts representing member states including Kuwait.

The conference sees as well the participation of some international, governmental and non-governmental organizations to mull measures taken in this field along with promoting the mechanism of international cooperation.

It is scheduled for participant countries and organizations to review in this session an eventful agenda including the ways of promoting the implementation of the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime and its subsidiary protocols following ten years of ratifying Palermo accord that prohibits trafficking in persons.

Further, discussion will focus on the extent to which member states are committed to implementing the UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress, and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially women and children as well as the experts’s consultations on the protocol against the smuggling of migrants by land, sea and air and the protocol against the illicit manufacturing of and trafficking in firearms, their parts and components and ammunition.

Some Arab diplomatic sources told KUNA that the special meeting on the Arab Initiative to combat human trafficking will be held here next Thursday and will be attended by the Arab League adviser for legal affairs Ridhwan bin Khadhra as well as delegate of the UN Cairo-based regional office on Drugs and Crime in the Middle East and North Africa Mohammed Abdulaziz as well as the representatives of Arab countries.

The same sources said that Director General of Qatar Foundation for Human Trafficking Combating Maryam Al-Maliki will submit during the meeting a report on the role of Qatar as subsidizer and financer of the above-mentioned initiative in addition to a report presented by the Norwegian delegate on the role of his country in offering financial support to the Arab initiative.
The Qatari capital of Doha hosted end of last March the activities of Doha Foundation Forum that launched the Arab initiative to combat human trafficking with a wide-scale Arab participation as a result of the coordinating meetings between the legal department at the Arab League and the UN office in Vienna as part of the contributions of the Arab side to the international efforts for curbing such crime.
The current UN conference also aims at applying optimal scientific and practical methods in what provides best services for the victims of human trafficking as well as setting up a dialogue among scientists, thinkers and all concerned experts to raise the awareness among officials and peoples of such crime.
The current gathering will also review the regional and international efforts on combating this crime as a problem faced by the Arab world along with helping victims and weathering subsequent challenges in addition to developing the vocational training provided to staff working in this sector and highlighting the role of mass media and governmantal and non-governmental organizations.