Paraguay forms national commission

At the end of a 2-days workshop led by the Vice Minister of Labour, Ms. Romero, the government, employers and workers of Paraguay have decided to follow the example of Brazil, Peru and Bolivia and have decided to create a national “Commission on Fundamental Rights at Work and the Prevention of Forced Labour”. This commission will include six representatives from each group (government, employers and workers) and will elaborate a national plan of action over the next 60 days. Together with Peru and Bolivia, Paraguay is one of the three countries included in the ILO (SAP-FL) project called “Forced Labour, Discrimination and Poverty Reduction among Indigenous Peoples”, funded by Sweden. The project focuses on the exploitation of indigenous workers through debt bondage and non-payment of wages, which has been a subject of discussions at the ILO since 1997, when the committee of experts first expressed its concerns. Since then, the ILO (SAP-FL) has provided technical cooperation trough a diagnostic study (“Servidumbre por Deudas y Marginacion en el Chaco de Paraguay”) and through a number of capacity building activities for labour inspectors, judges and social partners. As a direct result of this engagement with the ILO, the Ministry of Justice and Labour had inaugurated a new labour inspection office in the Chaco region in March 2006. The work in this office, however, has been difficult for its two labour inspectors, who appear to have recently resigned. The new commision will provide advice on how to resolve this problem. Participants of the workshop also called for the involvement of the national office for statistics, surveys and census in order to complement qualitative information with some better quantitative estimates of the proportion of farms involved and better information on the geographical location of the farms where forced labour occurs.