8 Europe and Central Asia Summary of Amnesty International’s Concerns in the Region, January – June 2007 and the first three months of 2007. According to the Chief of Police, out of 54 cases reported some 20 involved serious violence by men against their wives including two murders, two attempted murders, 11 threats, two woundings, two beatings and one case in which property was destroyed. In April the Director General of State Police undertook to establish domestic violence units, as foreseen in the new law. A domestic violence unit was established within the Directorate of Serious Crimes, with overall responsibility for the establishment of such units in major centres of population. By June one such domestic violence unit had been set up in Tirana. From March onwards the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) together with the Council of Europe and NGOs organized training for lawyers, judges, prosecutors and police. Trafficking in human beings On 6 February Albania ratified the Council of Europe’s Convention on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings. On 7 February OSCE officials and officials from the Albanian Ministries of the Interior, Tourism and Culture, Youth and Sport signed a memorandum which requires Albania to draft a code of conduct for tourist operators in Albania guaranteeing the protection of children from sexual exploitation. This code is to be based on the Code of Conduct for the Protection of Children from Sexual Exploitation in Travel and Tourism, a project initiated by the international NGO End Child Prostitution, Pornography and Trafficking (ECPAT), co-funded by the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF and developed with the support of the World Tourism Organization. Witness protection continued to be weak, although efforts at improvement were made. At the end of 2006 the Office for the Protection of Witnesses was up-graded to Directorate level, and in May 2007 Amnesty International Directorate employees received training on witness protection from the OSCE and the Police Assistance Mission of the European Commission to Albania (PAMECA). In April 2007 the Government approved standards for the treatment of victims of trafficking, proposed by the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs. These covered social support, accommodation, information, medical, psychological and material care, education, employment, training and measures for social protection. According to official statistics, during 2006 there were 103 prosecutions relating to charges of trafficking women for forced prostitution, and 11 to charges of trafficking children. Over the same period, 12 people were convicted of trafficking women for prostitution, and six people for trafficking children. In January 2007 the Serious Crimes Court sentenced Fatos Kapllani and Arben Osmani to 16 and 15 years’ imprisonment respectively for trafficking children to Greece and forcing them to work as prostitutes or beggars. The court found that the two men had targeted families living in great poverty and persuaded the children’s parents to let them be trafficked, and that they had ill-treated children who resisted their orders. In February 2007 it was reported that two Albanian women, a Greek woman and a Greek lawyer had been arrested in Thessaloniki, Greece, on a charge of selling the baby of one of the Albanian women to a Greek couple. Reported arrests and convictions of defendants accused of trafficking women for prostitution included the conviction of Spartak Balilaj by the Serious Crimes Court in January. The court found him guilty of trafficking his girlfriend in 2001 and forcing her to work as a prostitute in the UK. He was sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment. Access to Housing AI appealed to the authorities in May following concerns that 15 people in the AI Index: EUR 01/010/2007