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Riyadh: The Saudi Human Rights Commission dismissed a recent US State Department report accusing the kingdom of failing to comply with the minimum standards outlined in the American Trafficking Victims Protection Act.
The recently released US report accused Saudi Arabia, among a host of other countries, of being the worst countries in combating human trafficking, including prostitution.
Saudi Arabia was put on the third tier of the report which includes countries that do not comply with the minimum US standards to fight human trafficking or to make tangible efforts to improve their records.
Dr Adnan Mohammad Al Wazzan, rector of the Makkah-based Umm Al Qura University and member of HRC, said that the US report was full of contradictions and double standards while tackling the concept of human trafficking.
He said that foreign workers managed to come to Saudi Arabia whether legally or illegally and some pay huge amounts of money to come to the kingdom for work.
He added that this happens because those workers are fully aware that they can find job opportunities and "also to their conviction that the kingdom is ruled by the Sharia and thus their rights are guaranteed".
The Saudi HRC member told reporters on Saturday that all know "there is no place for prostitution in the kingdom, nor is there any centre for selling indecent films, there is no centre for training prostitutes and exporting them to other countries and no bars."
Dr Al Wazzan noted that international agreements have excluded from human trafficking some aspects like trafficking inside the country's territories, prostitution, sex tourism that did not imply cross-border transportation and the kidnapping of children by one of their parents or moving them outside the territories of a certain country.
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