Ezzedine Al Natour is a Jordanian journalist at 7iber, one of Jordan’s pre-eminent online news outlets.
Working with JHR trainer Mohammad Shamma, Ezzedine, known locally as “Ezz”, produced a powerful story on human trafficking of South-East Asian migrant workers in Jordan. Such workers endure low pay, violence, and in many cases, forced labor.
With the support of the Tamkeen Center for Legal Aid, a leading Jordanian organization that supports migrant workers, Ezz obtained several data-sets about violations against migrant workers, including human trafficking, and used them to produce a story that clearly laid out the scope, depth and breadth of the problem.
Once the story came out, a number of South-East Asian embassies set up a round table with Tamkeen to better analyze the situation of migrant workers in Jordan in order to develop protection plans for their citizens.
Ezz was also invited to the round table, as the author of the piece. He said that, “the amount of data on certain issues, such as human trafficking is very large. Organizations like Tamkeen can help journalists do a much better in reporting. They also have networks of people and victims of abuses that we can access. When you give a voice, you can see all the change in the world. You just need to do it, because very few stories like this are being produced in our country, and in the region as a whole.”
The full story, in Arabic,is here.