Word: haitian
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...Wednesday, however, a Haitian judge released eight of the missionaries, who according to their lawyers left the country by sunset. Two others - the group's leader, Laura Silsby, and her nanny and assistant, Charisa Coulter - remained behind bars for further investigation, but they may eventually be freed as well. Either way, the question now is whether their high-profile detention has put the fear of God into others who might think it's O.K. to take Haitian kids without lawful process - even if the intent is to give them refuge and more hopeful lives after a disaster as horrific...
...Marie de la Soudiere wants to make sure that folks like the missionaries don't get many more chances to even try it. As coordinator of the separated-children program in Haiti for UNICEF, the U.N. Children's Fund, de la Soudiere recently initiated a campaign to register Haitian youths, who were among the world's most vulnerable to trafficking even before the quake. The registry will be much like the one crafted in the wake of the tsunami that devastated Southeast Asia in 2004, but its purpose is more far-reaching than reuniting lost kids with relatives. The Haiti...
...poorest country, where children are frequently given up by their destitute parents. Those kids are all too often funneled to more-affluent families who turn them into slaves, known in Creole as restaveks, or to outright traffickers who force them into lives of prostitution in Haiti and abroad. The Haitian government estimates that there are about 300,000 restaveks in Haiti today. In many cases before and after the quake, parents and orphanages have delivered their kids to well-meaning but naive foreigners like the Idaho missionaries, who were collared on Jan. 29 for trying to ferry 33 poor Haitian...
...bond and are required to return to Haiti only if asked by a judge in order to answer further questions.) The missionaries' Dominican legal adviser, Jorge Puello, is wanted in both the U.S. and El Salvador on human-smuggling charges. (He denies the accusations.) In an interview with TIME, Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive did not criticize the judge's decision but said the case has at least reminded the world that "we had a disaster here, but we still have laws. We won't accept people trying to take advantage of this disaster to traffic children...
...Many - if not most - of those 33 children, it turns out, aren't even orphans; they were given to Silsby's group by desperate parents, either directly or via orphanages. De la Soudiere, a French citizen and veteran child advocate in disaster and war zones, believes the Haitian children's registry will make people like orphanage directors and clueless missionaries "think twice" before unlawfully scooping up lost or abandoned kids. "It gives these children a legal identity they didn't have before," she says. "In the end, I also think it will strengthen Haitian family culture, because Haitians have been...