Guinea Bissau Issues - 2024

Disputes - international

Guinea-Bissau - Senegal: there are no border disputes and the frontier is relatively stable although some rebels conducting a longstanding low-grade insurgency in the southern Casamance region of Senegal have used Guinea-Bissau as a safe haven

Refugees and internally displaced persons

refugees (country of origin): 7,757 (Senegal) (2022)

Trafficking in persons

tier rating: Tier 3 — Guinea-Bissau does not fully meet the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking and is not making significant efforts to do so, therefore, Guinea-Bissau remained on Tier 3; despite the lack of efforts, the government took some steps to address trafficking, including implementing procedures in its National Referral Mechanism to refer child victims to services from civil society organizations, providing anti-trafficking training to border officials, and conducting a public awareness radio campaign; however, Guinea-Bissau has never convicted a trafficker and failed to prosecute any alleged traffickers for the fourth consecutive year; the government continued to lack adequate victim identification and services and resources and political will to comprehensively combat trafficking (2023)

trafficking profile: human traffickers exploit domestic and foreign victims in Guinea-Bissau and Bissau-Guineans abroad; forced child begging is the most prevalent form of trafficking, with many victims exploited by corrupt Quranic teachers or associated traffickers; the corrupt teachers send large numbers of Bissau-Guinean boys to Senegal, as well as some to Guinea, Mali, and The Gambia; they also force boys from Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone, and The Gambia to beg in Bissau; boys reportedly were transported to southern Senegal for forced manual and agricultural labor; girls may be subjected to forced domestic service and child prostitution in Guinea, Senegal and The Gambia; women are recruited and exploited in domestic servitude abroad; girls, and to a lesser extent boys, are exploited in child sex tourism in the Bijagos, an archipelago off the coast of Guinea-Bissau that is largely devoid of government and law enforcement presence; Cuban nationals in Guinea-Bissau may have been forced to work there by the Cuban Government (2023)

Illicit drugs

important transit country for South American cocaine en route to Europe; enabling environment for trafficker operations due to pervasive corruption; archipelago-like geography near the capital facilitates drug smuggling