News Desk
A Maldives Immigration officer participated in a three-day regional workshop on human trafficking and migrant smuggling this week, as the government steps up efforts to tackle what officials describe as a growing challenge across the country’s labour and migration system.
Immigration Officer Ashiyath Mizna Mohamed attended the Regional Workshop on Trafficking in Persons and Smuggling of Migrants Data Collection for South Asia, held in Hulhumale from 12 to 14 May 2026. The workshop was a joint initiative between the Ministry of Homeland Security, Labour and Technology and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.
The three days focused on strengthening legislation in line with international standards, improving data collection systems and reviewing trends and challenges across South Asia. Participants emphasised that trafficking and smuggling are transnational problems that cannot be addressed by any single country alone. Better data, coordinated policy and improved information sharing across borders were identified as the most pressing needs.
For the Maldives, the timing is deliberate. Under Minister Ali Ihsan, the Home Ministry has been running Operation Kurangi since May 2024, fingerprinting and photographing more than 191,000 foreign nationals and moving into a third phase focused on locating and deporting those still without papers. The government estimates around 200,000 foreigners are currently in the country, a significant portion of them working outside the formal system. Some, as authorities have acknowledged, did not arrive by choice. Contractors have brought workers to the Maldives on project contracts, abandoned them without pay when the work ended and left them with no documents and no way home.
Combating human trafficking has become one of the more active areas of enforcement under the current administration. The UNODC has previously noted that the Maldives sits on transit and destination routes for labour trafficking in the South Asian region, with migrant workers from Bangladesh, India and other countries among the most vulnerable. Reliable prosecution data specific to the Maldives for 2025 and 2026 is not yet publicly available, but the U.S. State Department’s Trafficking in Persons Report has in recent years placed the Maldives on its Tier 2 Watch List, citing gaps in victim identification, prosecution of traffickers and support for survivors.
The workshop’s focus on victim-centred response strategies and early trend detection through better data systems directly supports what the Home Ministry is trying to build domestically. Identifying a trafficked worker from an undocumented one requires both legal frameworks and institutional capacity that the Maldives is still developing.
Whether the momentum holds will depend on how much of what was discussed in Hulhumale this week translates into enforceable policy and how quickly the data systems needed to track both victims and perpetrators can be put in place.
