six of the Kingdom's judges are participating today in the third scholarly symposium on human trafficking organized by the Ministry of Justice and the Naif Arab University for Security Sciences (NAUSS) at the university campus here. The last two symposiums included 49 judges. The two-day event is part of the cooperation between NAUSS and the Ministry in convening scholalry, specialized seminars for judges all over the country in order to acquire skills needed in combating human trafficking and to present the role of Islam in combating it, said assistant director of administrative development at the Ministry and the head of the coordination team, Abdullah Bin Mohammad Al-Firyan. NAUSS closely worked with UNICEF in 2007 to organize workshops to fight human trafficking, said Abdullah Bin Sager Al-Ghamdi, president of NAUSS. His school has supervised 12 Masters' and Ph.D dissertations on the topic in part of its efforts to combat this growing trade of international slavery. The university has employed top-notch experts from the Johns Hopkins University and Geneva International Peace research Institute and the United Nations African Institute for the Prevention of Crime and more experts from the Arab World to work in training programs dedicated to combating human trafficking, he said. Slavery has become a booming international trade that involves at least 2.5 million people being trafficked in bondage through physical or psychological force at any one time, representing the tip of a much greater iceberg. The US government says that up to 800,000 people are shipped like commodities across international borders to serve as cheap labor. The UN international Labor Organization calculates the minimum number of people in forced labor at 12.3 million in a market valued at $32 billion, while research by Free the Slaves, a non-governmental organization (NGO) based in the United States, puts the number at 27 million people.
