Child Protection ine izwi rine simba pa WTTC Summit muBuenos Aires

At a press conference today in Buenos Aires at the ongoing WTTC Summit Sandra Howard, Vice Minister, Commerce Industry and Tourism of Colombia and Helen Marano, Executive Vice President External Affairs for WTTC today announced the International Summit on Child Protection in Bogota, Columbia 6-7 June 2018

The Summit will be hosted by the Government of Columbia, which has taken a number of innovative child protection measures in the travel and tourism sector.

It will explore accelerated actions for implementation of the recommendations of the Global Study on Sexual Exploitation of Children in Travel and Tourism.

eTN publisher Juergen Steinmetz will be speaking at the event. Steinmetz is a member of the UNWTO Task Force against exploitation of children. The annual meeting of this group during the ITB trade show in Berlin in March was canceled by the new UNWTO Secretary-General after he took office.

UNWTO never responded to why this meeting was canceled. When asked by Steinmetz the Colombian Vice Minister confirmed the importance and also the commitment for UNWTO to be part of the upcoming conference but had no explanation why the UNWTO task group did not meet. She assumed the new Secretary General is shifting the way the World Tourism Organization will deal with the problem of child protection, and supporting the conference in Colombia may be the way forward.