Guria India Blog

BREAKING NEWS: On December 30th, 2014 Guria executed another rescue operation! We rescued 35 bonded laborers from brick kilns in the Mirzapur district of Uttar Pradesh. This included 11 children.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all our supporters!

On December 23rd, 2014, our legal coordinator Sunil was brutally attacked on his way to the Guria office due to his refusal to drop our current cases against prominent human traffickers. He suffered a fractured knee and an injured shoulder  and ankle. In spite of a complaint lodged, the police have taken no action against the aggressors. Frontline Human Rights Defenders (Dublin, Ireland) has just released a letter in solidarity with Guria. ( http://www.frontlinedefenders.org/node/27912 ) This is yet another example of the police misconduct that allows trafficking to flourish. In the past, the police have routinely ignored attacks against our employees. Please SIGN OUR PETITION ( goo.gl/p3oXqc ) demanding an end to this rampant police misconduct.

On December 24th, Guria organised a national consultation in Lucknow about our recent Public Interest Litigation in the Hon'ble Supreme Court of India regarding the rescue of trafficked children & women from brothels! Thank you to Actionaid for supporting this programme. On this day GURIA also launched a TOLL-FREE TELE-HELPLINE 18008 33 3434 exclusively for rescue of enslaved children/women. Much progress in the fight against modern-day slavery.

The Times of India published an article worth reading about the caste system and the people from all over the world who are getting involved in the fight for dalit rights: African-American lawyers, former outcasts of Japan’s caste system, a nd even Russian models. http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/mumbai/Battle-against-caste-system-goes-global/articleshow/45515182.cms We thought to share it here, and it is also worth reminding that almost all of the human trafficking victims we work with especially sex trafficking victims are dalits.

** Reminder ** If you are free tonight - at SOAS (London) at 5pm today Guria volunteer, Azza Cohen, will be giving a sneak preview and discussing the film Guria volunteers have made about Guria, drop by if you can and hear about the new documentary which follows Guria in their fight against human trafficking and child prostitution in northern India. Guria's story is of something incredible and extreme - where you will see the greatest humanity alongside the greatest evils. We will keep you posted on the release date for the full film.  https://www.facebook.com/ events/765593400168536/

Thank you,  Thomson Reuters Foundation  and  The Freedom Fund , for citing Guria’s work as an example of a successful anti-trafficking strategy in your recent report Putting Justice First: Legal Strategies to Combat Human Trafficking in Norther n India! The Putting Justice First report “examines the legal challenges faced by victims of human trafficking in India and makes key recommendations on legal strategies to combat trafficking and improve legal outcomes for victims,” and we are grateful that Guria’s PILs (Public Interest Litigations) has been shared as a successful strategy for this purpose. To read the report, click here:  http://www.freedomfund.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Putting-Justice-First.pdf . Guria is mentioned in Chapter 3.

Guria just submitted over TWO THOUSAND pages of evidence documenting police misconduct in 100 cases of Sex Trafficking, Child Prostitution, and Rape.  A Times of India article was published about it here: http://goo.gl/UcGSkv You can help by signing our petition and demanding that this police misconduct en d!  http://goo.gl/c9RvrO This February, Guria released the original report revealing this misconduct, and the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh ordered an inquiry into the matter. We spent months assembling all the official evidence before submitting the 2000+ pages last week! Here is a link to our original report  http://goo.gl/tAqz9G , and here is the original article the Times of India posted about it. http://goo.gl/gfoUQ4