Welcome to this special bonus edition of Democracy in Focus, a collaboration between New Narratives and Front Page Africa. I’m Anthony Stephens.
In recent years, Liberia has made big gains in tackling human trafficking, convicting several traffickers including an agent of the National Security Agency and bringing hundreds of victims home from the Middle East.
Those wins saw the county move up on the U.S. government’s Trafficking In Persons ranking. But things took a turn for the worse in 2023 when the Weah administration slashed the budget for anti-trafficking efforts by ninety per cent. Prosecutions stalled. Victims remain stranded overseas. This year Liberia was downgraded to the tier two watchlist.
In this special interview, I speak with two antihuman trafficking experts in the U.S. embassy – Juan Martinez and Drew Engel – to find out what that means for Liberia.
Support for this podcast came from the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and the European Union. (Until September 2026, the program was supported by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency and American Jewish World Service.)
