Other Presidential Documents vember 2000, the International Labor Organization (ILO) Governing Body concluded that the Government of Burma had not taken effective action to deal with the use of forced labor in the country and, for the first time in its history, called on all ILO members to review their policies to ensure that those policies did not support forced labor. The United States strongly supported this decision. Over the past year, the Government of Burma has slowly begun to work with the ILO on measures to address the problem. In September 200% it allowed an ILO High Level Team to visit Burma to assess the situation. That team concluded that the GOB had made an "obvious, but uneven" ef- fort to curtail the use of forced labor, but that forced labor persisted, par- ticularly in areas where the government was waging active military cam- paigns against insurgent forces. It also recommended that the ILO establish a permanent presence in Burma. A second ILO team visited Burma in Feb- ruary 2002 to follow up on this recommendation, and eventually agreement was reached with the ILO in Geneva regarding the appointment of an ILO liaison officer, pending the establishment of a permanent ILO office in Ran- goon. That liaison officer has since been appointed. The ILO has also iden- tified a permanent representative to serve in Burma. Perhaps most impor- tantly of all, in August 2002, the ILO began field visits to sites along the Thai/Burmese border which have been identified by Amnesty International and other organizations as "hot spots" for forced labor and Burmese Army abuse of ethnic minorities. That said, there were continuing signs that forced labor remains a problem, with reports, even in Rangoon, of laborers being dragooned by the military. Finally, the government has continued with the slow release of political prisoners. Altogether, approximately 400 political prisoners have been re- leased from detention since October 2000. In response to an appeal from UN Special Rapporteur Pinheiro, the government has also released, on hu- manitarian grounds, approximately 400 women prisoners who either had small children or were pregnant. To date, releases have included a majority of the NLD members held in prison, all members of the NLDs Central Com- mittee, several major ethnic leaders, several student leaders, and all but 19 of the MPs elected to the \177990 Parliament. Even with these releases, how- ever, hundreds of political prisoners remain in prison or under detention in Burma as of September 2002, including approximately 200 NLD mem- bers. Burma is a Tier 3 human trafficking country that has not developed preven- tion, protection or law enforcement programs to address fully the serious trafficking problems that plague the country, but has made some progress in recognizing and publicizing the perils of trafficking in persons. It has signed the \177950 Convention for the Suppression of Traffic in Persons and the Prostitution of Others and is a participant in the UN Inter-Agency Project on the reduction of trafficking in the Mekong sub-region although its other international and regional anti-trafficking cooperation is very lim- ited. In a report delivered to the U.S. Government in August, it also high- lighted the recent information activities of Myanmar National Committee for Women's Affairs; the enforcement efforts of a newly formed Working Committee for the Prevention of Trafficking in Persons (which is chaired by the Home Minister); the legislation it has applied to combat trafficking; and the jail sentences that it has handed out to more than \17700 traffickers over the past 3 years. However, information on its funding of anti-traf- 321
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