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The US State Department has released its 2020 Trafficking in Persons Report, and once again, Belize has been assessed as a tier 2 country. Last year, Belize made a slight upgrade to the TIPs Tier 2 Watchlist, after being labelled a Tier 3 country the previous years. This year, the US State Department is ranking Belize once again as a Tier 2 watchlist country. There are over 40 other countries, including several Caribbean Nations, in the same ranking.

Tier 2 indicates that a country does not fully comply with the minimum standards of the US Trafficking Victims Protection Act, but its government is making significant efforts to bring that country into compliance.

There is also a Tier 2 watchlist, which are Tier 2 countries that are either recording increases or large numbers of human trafficking victims, demonstrates a lack of evidence supporting its efforts to improve their human trafficking efforts, or are committing to taking future steps to improve.

In this year's, assessment, the TIP's Report says, quote, "the government did not demonstrate overall increasing efforts from the previous reporting period. The government did not initiate any new prosecutions against traffickers and continued to apply victim identification procedures inconsistently, despite improvement in this area." End quote.

A country can only remain on the Tier 2 watchlist for 2 consecutive years. We are told Belize has to demonstrate improvements this year, or it will be downgraded back to Tier 3.