Journalistic Investigations Center

In March of this year, the Police and the Prosecutor’s Office announced that they had liquidated a network of child traffickers and pedophiles, the heads of the grouping having been arrested. Under the excuse of organizing tourist trips through Moldova, including the Transnistrian region, and also to Ukraine in Odessa, the network in fact offered juvenile boys for sexual relations to foreign clients. In less than a month from the arrests, we found out that the network continued operating. The “business” had been taken over by one of the former victims who, in order to reestablish the connections with the clients, lowered the prices on the services provided. Divided into two, the network freely operates in Chişinău and Tiraspol.  
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For nearly a decade, the General Prosecutor’s Office (GPO) and the Center for Combating Trafficking in Human Beings (CCTHB) have said that they have been tracing the Israeli doctor Michael Zis for trafficking in organs. He once worked in Edineţ and then emigrated and operated on tens of people in Turkey, Ukraine and Israel, extracting organs for transplants. At present the surgeon is in freedom in Israel and the Moldovan authorities are not even trying to have him extradited. On the other hand, the officers hunt for the Zis’ victims in Moldova and, for the most part, incriminate them as traffickers  
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A child who has been victim of abuse or negligence most of the times goes again through nightmares when told to talk about the scenes of abuse before the people of the law. Moldovan courts do not have either rooms arranged for hearing children or specialists trained in interviewing juveniles. And this is even though Moldova has signed international documents and thus committed to ensure non-traumatizing conditions of hearing children who have been victims or witnesses of abuse.  
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Thoughtful and with sad eyes but dressed in brand clothes. This is how children of migrants look like most of the times. For several years, the authorities have been presenting a single figure showing how many Moldovan children have one or both of their parents gone abroad –100 thousand. Although estimative, this figure does not present the reality. Human rights specialists say that the real number of such children is much higher.  
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In 2010, Moldova ranked in the top 10 countries with the largest number of claims submitted to the European Court of Human Rights. Most cases lost to the ECHR were related to the breach of the right to a fair trial  
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One of the most resonant files on trafficking in human beings, opened in 2009, is still being considered by the trial court, without a sign that a court hearing might happen soon. This is the case about several Moldovans taken to work in Russia, from where they had to shortly come back home, on foot, without money and documents, as they were seized from them, in an attempt to run away from their employer, also Moldovan, like from a bad dream.  
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Although nearly two years have passed since April 2009, no policemen, not even of those who maltreated juveniles, have been held liable. Instead, the juveniles accused of theft, hooliganism and participation in mass disorders have answered before the law.  
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Most of the victims of traffic accidents wait for years to receive damages from insurance companies. The imperfect legislation and legal actions that can last years in a row seem to play the insurance companies’ game and to work against the ordinary people. According to the data of the National House of Financial Market (NHFM), in 2010, the amounts of the damages paid by insurance companies decreased by 20 percent as compared to 2009, while the income from insurances constantly grew.  
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The financial reports of the political parties that ran for the elections of 28 November, the size of the donations as well as the declarations of property filed with the Central Electoral Commission (CEC) by the candidates registered on political parties lists shows that unemployed and young people without a penny as well as pensioners and millionaires got involved in the run for those 101 seats in the Parliament.  
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They cannot have friends and are not accepted at kindergarten or school. Several thousand children in Moldova cannot enjoy their childhood because they have been diagnosed HIV positive or come from families where one or both parents have this infection. Day by day, children of this category bear the wickedness and hostility of the environment where they try to survive.  
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